The e-Book Chronicles, Part IV

Today I made the financial commitment to a decision I've been weighing for awhile ... I bought my own ISBNs. Perhaps some of you might like a bit of explanation ...

The ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is a book's principal identifier in the marketplace; it has been characterized as a book's "social security number." This unique identifier allows any person or retailer, anywhere, to positively ID the book to which it is attached. Every book publisher in the United States has its own unique set of ISBNs, all of which start with the same prefix. This prefix is like the publisher's DNA, becoming a part of each book it publishes. So, if you're going to be a publisher and you plan to sell your book in the public marketplace--both on shelves and in the virtual retail space of the Internet--you need your own ISBNs for your books.

Now, I am well aware that online retailers like Lulu, Amazon.com, and others will provide self-published authors with a unique identifier for books sold on their platforms. However, these aren't the same thing as a unique ISBN. In fact, they aren't really ISBNs at all, since they don't identify the book outside the platform to which they are assigned. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing for everyone. If, for example, you want to self-publish your book and you're content with marketing it through a single channel like Amazon.com or Google Play Books (the latest name for Google's virtual bookstore), then allowing them to assign an internal identifier to your book might be a fine way to go. People will be able to find your book, purchase it, and download it to their devices. Everybody's happy.

However, if you want total control over how and where your book is sold, and if you want to be in control of your book's metadata (the critical information about price, title, author, publisher, format, and other details of your book that retailers and purchasers depend on to be able to find your book in the marketplace), then you really have to have your own ISBN. Since my day gig is working as a managing editor for an academic publishing house, I know the importance of maintaining control over your metadata. One of the catchphrases in the digital publishing world is, "Metadata is king." Although, I guess the grammatically correct form would be "Metadata are king." But I digress.

Thus, for me, the final tipping point was reached when I decided I wanted to do business as an actual publisher, rather than just having my name in the front of the book as author. In order to do that, your ISBN must match your publisher data, and the only way that can happen is if you own the ISBN with which the book is registered.

Of course, as you may have suspected, ISBNs--unlike the internally assigned identifiers provided by Amazon and Lulu--aren't free. There's only one place you can get them: from Bowker, Inc., the company that maintains the ISBN registry for the United States. A single ISBN is $100. However, since I plan to issue several of my older titles as e-books, I decided to buy a block of 10 ISBNs from Bowker for $250 (do you get the feeling that they discourage one-off purchases?). I'll say this for them, though: for a monopoly, they maintain a pretty user-friendly website. I got in, registered, paid, and had my block of ten ISBNs in less than ten minutes, start to finish. You can check them out for yourself at https://www.myidentifiers.com/Get-your-isbn-now.

So, bottom line ... the $250 I just parted ways with could be seen as a setback for my original low/no-cost objective for this self-publishing project. On the other hand, it could be viewed as a strategic concession to the greater objectives of maintaining more control over my book's metadata and having increased flexibility to market it on multiple platforms, thus increasing its visibility--the current buzzword is "discoverability"--in the marketplace.

But to make the type of professional impression with my book that I hope to make, I've got to tackle cover design and layout ... about which more in future posts ...



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