The Economic Survey of the Book Industry, known informally as The Cheney Report, was a paper written by retired New York banker O.H.
The purpose of the report was to analyze the overall structure of the book publishing industry and to find ways to improve the system as a whole.
Cheney also correctly anticipated the increasing demand for more books at the end of the Second World War, and sought to find ways to better distribute them.
While he did not present a specific plan for this machine based coding system in his report, Cheney's revolutionary ideas helped spur the creation and implementation, several decades later, of the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) that the United States adopted to categorize books.
"[2]Almost none of the ideas presented in the report were taken seriously, and it was not until much later in American history that the machine based coding system was invented and implemented.