Bookland
The EAN country codes 978 (and later 979) have been allocated since the 1980s in order to reserve a Unique Country Code (UCC) prefix for EAN identifiers of published books, regardless of country of origin, so that the EAN space can catalog books by ISBN rather than maintaining a redundant parallel numbering system. Similar arrangements are in place for ISSNs (for periodicals) and ISMNs (for sheet music).
Read more about this topic: International Article Number (EAN)