European Article Numbering

European Article Numbering (EAN) is the European equivalent of the American UPC? product barcodes that are printed on almost everything that is sold in stores. While the U.S. UPC-A is 12 digits, the European EAN-13 is 13 digits. Both systems are part of GTIN, the Global Trade Item Numbering system. GTIN numbers are 14 digits, and can be constructed by prefixing a UPC-A with 00 or an EAN-13 with 0.

EAN prefixes which indicate the manufacturer are assigned by EAN International (http://www.ean-int.org/) and its 96 national member organizations. A total of 850,000 manufacturers use EAN codes.

All books (including those sold in U.S. stores) have EAN-13 codes that are constructed by prefixing the ISBN number with 978 and recalculating the trailing checksum digit, because the ISBN and EAN codes use different algorithms for this. The EAN checksum digit algorithm is compatible with UPC-A, and is described on the EAN International website.