I just wanted to take a little time and talk about ISBNs. Last week I held a Twitter session for an hour - #isbnsebooks - where writers, publishers, and other Bookish Tweeps and I all looked at the many ebook formats out there and examined the necessity of having one ISBN per format.
Right now, there’s no other way to publish if you want to be distributed by a third party. If all you’re doing is selling ebooks from your own website, or exclusively with Amazon, then an ISBN is not strictly necessary. But the moment you start working with distributors, who then make the ebook available to a variety of websites, an ISBN is crucial. The supply chain does not operate without them - they are the basis upon which massive databases are built.
Can you use another identifier? Again, if you’re only selling on your own site, that’s fine. Nobody will know but you. But the moment your ebook (or any other book) leaves your house, it needs a number slapped on it that everyone can recognize and work with.
The main objection to ISBNs seems to be that of cost. In other countries (except the UK), ISBNs are subsidized by the state and so appear free to publishers and authors. Here in the US, the cost of creating and maintaining the ISBN database is passed along to the users of that database. It is a cooperative sort of arrangement - but there is not enough transparency around it. Nobody seems to know exactly how much it costs to maintain the data, or why ISBN pricing is the way it is. I’ve been advocating to Bowker, the US ISBN agency, to be explicit around costs and to become more transparent; I think they will be doing so in the next few months. If publishers and authors knew how much it cost to keep the ISBN database/registration going, then perhaps we could all understand things a little bit better.
Additionally, Bowker’s bulk pricing for ISBNs has struck many smaller presses as discriminatory. If Pearson or McGraw-Hill or HarperCollins or Random House buy ISBNs, they do so in massive bulk - thousands of them. And they get deep discounts as a result. But of course these guys publish thousands of books at a time. A smaller press, perhaps one who publishes 10 or 50 books a year, will never get the benefit of that sort of discount. Thus small presses - who are frequently operating on a shoestring - are penalized financially.
I haven’t found a good way around this yet, but I am chair of BISAC’s Identifiers Committee, and these are issues we’re exploring actively. When I have something to report, I will - meanwhile, stay tuned for the next #isbnsebooks session on Twitter, and follow me at @ljndawson.