A commenter on my last post asked about why I bought 100 ISBNs. That does seem like a lot, no?
Well, the ISBN game is a bit of a racket.
ISBN stands for “International Standard Book Number” — and it uniquely identifies a book world wide. It even identifies different forms of the same book. So I needed four ISBNs for my three books, one each for the physical, PDF, MOBI, and ePUB editions.
The “racket” part comes in how you buy them. The only place to buy them in the US, as far as I know, is from Bowker Identifier Services. If you go to their page selling the ISBNs, you’ll notice that the pricing is……interesting. One ISBN is $175. Ten is $295, and 100 is $575. Now, one isn’t useful when you want to publish multiple versions of a book. And given that my wife had plans to publish books, and we thought we might publish books for others, we definitely needed more than ten. So 100 it was. (I notice that prices have gone up. We paid $500 for our 100 ISBNs.) There is a strange economy of scale at work here.
It worked out for us to get 100. We’ve used about 25, and we don’t have to worry about buying new ones anytime soon. They are pretty easy to use and assign, and CreateSpace will automatically create the barcode for you (which Bowker is happy to charge you for….)
I should note that strictly speaking you don’t need to get your own ISBNs. You can publish electronically to your hearts content without them (LeanPub has provisions for, but doesn’t require, them), and CreateSpace will issue one for you if you want, thought they will be listed as the publisher. However, we wanted our books published under our own company name, and so decided to make the investment. Amazon won’t sell your book without and ISBM, and your physical book needs an ISBN if you have aspirations of selling your book in a brick and mortar store, too.
Overall it has been a good idea for us to get the 100, though I do remember being a bit perturbed at first when I saw the strange pricing scale. In the end, though, it has worked out well for us as I said.
And remember, we here at Nepeta Publishing be happy to publish your book for very favorable terms, ISBNs and all. 🙂