For most of
us who have been in the publishing industry for a while, we know what an ISBN
is but we may not know a lot about it. For many first time or new authors
coming into the profession, the ISBN is a bit of a mystery. I am an author but
I also have a day job working for an online bookseller – I deal with ISBNs
daily. I'd like to take out the mystery and help all authors get a grasp on the
ISBN and why it's your friend.
ISBN stands
for "International Standard Business Number" and basically, it is
nothing more than a tracking device. That's it, that's all it does. It tracks
your sales. Think about when you go in a bookstore. You get a really good book
you like and you decide to buy it. You take it to the counter and what's the
first thing the salesperson does? S/he turns the book over and uses a scanner
to track the book. That racks up a sale based on the ISBN – well, and the bar
code which is an electronic representation of your ISBN.
Just as a
nice little FYI – periodicals (newspapers, magazines, etc) also have a tracking
sytem, called the International Standard
Serial Number, also known as the ISSN. There are two different kinds of
ISSNs. One is the standard print ISSN and the other called the e-ISSN for
digital versions.
Each book,
each format of that book, each edition of that book will have its own ISBN –
they are specific to the edition, the format (hard cover, paperback, audio,
ebook, etc), and title. If you have your book out in ebook, paperback, and
audio – then you'll have three separate ISBNs, one for each. Every time your
book is purchased, in whatever form and through any bookstore – be it online or
a brick and mortar – that ISBN information is stored and transmitted to your
publisher (or yourself, if you're an indie). The number keeps track of sales –
what the customer bought, when s/he bought it, where s/he bought it, etc. It
also tracks information such as publisher identification and language group.
Once upon a
time, sales were tracked locally but in a very haphazard way. So, in 1965,
Professor Emeritus Gordon Foster (Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland) devised a
tracking method called Standard Book
Numbering or the SBN. The original SBN was a nine digit number. In 1970,
the International Organization for Standardization
(ISO) developed the ten (10) digit ISBN in an effort to standardized what was
becoming a global market for book sales. Then in 2007, the thirteen (13) digits
number became the standard, which includes the EAN – once known as the European Article Number but has since
been renamed the International Article
Number – that you see at the bottom of the bar code.
Let's look
at a typical bar code to break down what you can find out from the ISBN.
The EAN (978)
is what signifies that this is a book that is being purchased. The first number
always goes outside of the bar code, which is used for scanners to record sales.
That's literally the only reason. The number following the EAN is the actual
ISBN. For the ISSN, the EAN is 977. Just in case you were curious.
The next
numbers are the group numbers – they identify the language of the book. 0 – 1
signify English speaking countries, 2 is for French speaking countries, and so
on. This number can be 1 – 5 digits long, depending on which language the book
is printed in.
The next
group of digits, usually a four digit code represents the publisher. All books published by a particular publisher
will have that same four digits. So if you, as an indie author, buy up a large
enough block of ISBNs, Bowker – the company in this country that regulates and
sells ISBNs – will allow you to register as a publisher/imprint. You will get a
unique four digit identifier and from then on, all of your ISBNs will contain
that identifier.
The next
three digits identify the title. Your book, The
Glory of Handbags, will have a specific number that will be unique to the
title.
The last
digit is a check number that uses a sophisticated algorithm that verifies that
all of the information in the EAN barcode and ISBN are correct.
If you
publish with a traditional press – large or small – these numbers help them
track their sales using internal algorithms that can break down the data by
version sold, where it was purchased, when it was purchased, and the type of
sale (credit card or cash, online or "brick and mortar" store). These
reports will determine your royalties as well as the editorial and marketing
staff's cut, as well as the profit margin for the publisher.
If you're a
self-published Indie, then you're using companies like Smashwords to distribute
to retailer and wholesalers, or straight to the retailers like Barnes &
Noble's PubIt or Amazon's KDP Platform (for ebook) or CreateSpace (for
print/trade paperback). They generate an abbreviated report for you that give
you a minor breakdown of sales by region/country, title/format, the total amount
of sales, and the amount of royalties you'll be paid for those sales.
You can
learn even more about ISBNs and how to use them, as well as how to purchase
them, directly from Bowker's
Identifier Services. The site will require you to create an account if you
want to use that service. ISBNs purchased directly from Bowker are cheaper if
purchased in larger quantities of ten or more. If all you want is one ISBN, you
can find other
services that will sell them in singles – a search on Google or Yahoo! can
give you links to websites that will sell them to you. Pricing usually starts
at $25 – 35 per ISBN and in some cases will also include the EAN bar code to
put on the cover of your print copy. If you're creating an ebook or audiobook,
you won't need that barcode.
Written by Jesse V Coffey
