The most important contribution of The Cheney Report to the market of American book publishing, and to American culture as a whole, was his insistence on the implementation of a standardized form of communication within the book publishing world. Cheney was the first person to suggest some kind of machine based coding system for the organization of books. 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.