ISBNs

Purchasing an ISBN

Do you need to purchase your own ISBN?

Well, that entirely depends on your needs. If you are only publishing to KDP, leveraging Kindle Unlimited (KU) or KDP Select, both of which are exclusivity contracts with Amazon agreeing that your book will not be posted anywhere else, then no. You are probably better off taking the ISBN they offer you. The same goes with if you only intend to publish through Draft2Digital or IngramSpark. If they offer an ISBN purchase option, it will likely be cheaper, but you won’t be able to use that ISBN anywhere else and you don’t own the metadata attached to that ISBN. This is not the same as a Barcode, but we will get to that in a second.

Remember: You will need an ISBN for every format of your book, be it eBook, Paperback, Hardcover, or Audiobook—and with the physical copies, variations in size, cover design, and contents will require a separate ISBN as well. This is considered a new edition (i.e. second or third edition) and is treated as an entirely separate product.

In any country, there is a designated authority on ISBNs, in the US that’s Bowker, in Canada that’s the ISBN Canada, Library and Archives, etc. If you want to know what the ISBN authority in your country is, have a look here:

ISBN International Agencies

Why is this important?

As I said, it’s entirely based on your use case. But it’s good to know the details behind what it means because anywhere you buy your ISBN outside of those authorities is a third-party and the ISBN they issued you, is one that they bought from one of those authorities in bulk, and sold to you at a higher price to pocket the remainder.

As an example from Bowker:

• A single ISBN from Bowker is $125

• Buying a 10 pack (a popular option) will cost $295 – which lowers the cost from $125/each to $29.50/each – and if you’re publishing in multiple formats (i.e. eBook and Paperback) it is a much more fiscally responsible option (albeit still expensive).

• Buying the 1,000 pack will cost $1,500, which brings the per item cost down to $1.50/each – a staggering difference if you can afford it.

Now, imagine a company buying several bundles of the 1,000 ISBNs from Bowker and selling them to you at $25/each. A huge savings for you from the $125 cost, but also rakes them in $23.50 in profit and they still own your ISBN and all the metadata that goes behind it, which affects how your ISBN shows up in searches and databases, etc.

Barcodes

When you purchase an ISBN, you often get the option to buy a barcode to go with it...you need this for your physical books. Well, easy way to get a barcode without the $25 cost (Bowker pricing – I’m from the US so that’s why I fall back on Bowker examples), is to generate a template from IngramSpark and include your ISBN – this will generate a Barcode for you.

IngramSpark Cover Template Generator

You can use a free image manipulation tool like GIMP to cut the barcode out and use it on your book. It will scan and work in any system no differently than one that you purchased, but will appear slightly differently (cosmetic differences only)

That’s all for today! I hope you’ve found it useful!