ESBN or Electronic Standard Book Number is a new beta that offers Web 2.0 digital rights management and copyright solution to help identify electronic content online. ESBN uses a 19 digit number similar to the way printed books are identified with an ISBN number. The goal of ESBN is to make digital content easier to identify and find via a search. The basic content types that ESBN identifies are MP3s, videos, PDFs, eBooks, software, and so on. ESBN.org is managing the project and is the place to go for more information.
It will be interesting to see what kind of support ESBN attacts going forward. The site offers a Firefox extension which helps enable easy ESBN assignment which should help adoption. Overall, I think the idea is a great one but I think it is going to take a little bit of time and buy-in from the various online big players to position ESBN as the standard.
