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 ...



Thomsblog (a weblog) by Thom Lemmons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

The e-Book Chronicles, Part I

Sometime in the early 1990s, I swore I would be the last person on Earth to get a cellular phone. Bear in mind, this was when "handy" meant a bag phone roughly the size of the trade paperback edition of War and Peace, and you had to keep it plugged into the cigarette lighter of your car (most of the time).

Of course, we all know the end of the story; it's the same ending experienced by all the other technologically hesitant: I eventually got a cell phone and quickly realized I couldn't live without it. Ditto my laptop, my broadband Internet, etc., etc.

These days, I'm considering joining a support group for the iPhone-dependent. Clearly, I am not an Early Adopter, but I eventually cave. Most of us do.

But then came the rumblings preceding the digital book revolution. And here, friends, I dug in my heels. "A book is paper and glue and binding, with pages you can turn," I sniffed. "I want to smell the ink; I want to run my fingers along the spine. I don't want to boot up my book."


Last Christmas, my daughter and my wife ganged up and got me a NOOK Color. You can probably guess the rest.

Concurrent with my gradual immigration to the Digital Promised Land, content megasources like Amazon and others have been making it cheaper and cheaper to produce and publish e-books (and they've had a few nasty spats with Big Publishing along the way). If we know one thing about technology, it's that over time, it makes certain things cheaper. Thanks to Gutenberg and his intellectual heirs, you no longer have to be a feudal lord to be able to acquire a wide variety of reading material.


The process that required five centuries or so in printed books is happening with e-books in a couple of weeks, it seems. Now, you can download free programs that will convert your properly formatted word processing files into e-book files that can be sold online ... or forced on unsuspecting friends and family members, as the case may be (assuming they have e-readers, that is).

As an author with a few books that have come to the end of their life cycle in print, lately I've been thinking about ways to try and squeeze a little more income out of my currently fallow intellectual property. My notion is that I should be able to scan some of my out-of-print books (for which publishing rights have, by contract, reverted to me), do a little reformatting, and, by means of some free software, convert them to e-books that can be uploaded to Amazon's Kindle store, Lulu.com, and maybe, with a little luck and persistence, to other online stores like BarnesandNoble.com. Whether anyone will buy them ... well, that's another story.


So, this is the beginning of my foray into e-book self-publishing. If you want, you can come along for the ride. I'll document the process, including my frustrations, my successes, and how it all turns out. I'm pretty sure I'll learn something, if only how it shouldn't be done. But who knows? I may locate a vein of milk and honey. We'll see ...



Thomsblog (a weblog) by Thom Lemmons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.