There's a pretend country hiding in every book's barcode

There's a pretend country called Bookland. If you're an avid reader, there's a good chance that you have a book on your shelf that has been labeled as being from this pretend land. Bookland was created to serve as a unique prefix within the European Article Number barcode system.

From Wikipedia:

The codes "978" and later "979" were designated as Bookland prefixes in the 1980s to allow the EAN namespace to catalogue books by International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) rather than requiring a separate or redundant EAN numbering system. Bookland does not represent a real geographic location.

I am disappointed to find out that Bookland is not a real country I can go on vacation to. If it were, that's where I would be heading next summer. Bookland sounds a lot cooler than where I am currently located.

More about numbers that hide a story:

Boing Boing has explained how the black-and-white lines of a barcode encode their digits, and separately covered the wider world of quasi-countries: places with their own flags, governments, and currencies that no other nation recognizes.