When to Buy Your Own ISBNs | Hacker News Reader

When to Buy Your Own ISBNs

mwl.io

73 pointsjanvdberg29 comments

Fun fact: the 13 digit ISBNs are actually UPCs (aka bar codes) but with the country code set to "Bookland"

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookland

Does this scale? What are the country codes for Computerland, Phoneland, Chairland, Deskland?

There is a Musicland (979) but Bookland seems to “invaded” parts of its namespace!

These are hacks so that you only need one table rather than separate lists of ISBNs and EANs. Chairs (etc) didn’t have a pre-existing registry so....no need Chairland.

This article expended a lot of text and avoided the actual useful information.

- 1 ISBN costs $125 - 10 ISBNs cost $250 - 100 ISBNs cost $575 - 1000 ISBNs cost $1000

So if you are fairly sure to self-publish more than 8 books in your lifetime, of course you would buy a thousand of them.

Can you resell these ISBNs?

Edit: Nevermind, I missed it in the article. The author says he can't.

Why not buy 100 of them?

How many individuals have actually published more than 100 books?

It sounds like it's not 1 ISBN per book, it's one ISBN per printing/publisher of each book. If you have 9 books and 9 publishers in different countries print them once and then in some countries they get reprinted/resold later on by a different publisher...

Not just that, even different editions By the same publisher must have different ISBNs. It is even recommended that every electronic format of the same book should have a different ISBN (though I see many publishers not doing that).

The article is pretty clear about intending to use the same ISBN for different printers. So 9 numbers, not 81. Their primary goal is to capture the value of having the same ISBN in different channels.

Its an absolute scam that you have to pay $125 for a number. I can understand some small fee for keeping a system to track them running but anything more than a few dollars for a block is an outrage.

It's almost like cryptocurrency. Keeping the number small makes is scare. If you put price on it, people don't waste them.

ISBN issuance is country-specific, however. Different countries have different ways to issue them. Many give them free.

To be fair: We have more or less pretty much run out of them, so preventing their waste or misuse is worthwhile. (Much like with IPv4 addresses.) Yes, we've now grabbed 979 of the ISBN-13 space, in addition to the more or less full 978 space, but that merely doubles the ISBN space, since many of the other prefixes are used for other products in EAN.

Sure, we can always devise new solutions when these numbers run out as well, but there's a lot of order system overhead to such things.

Just add more digits to the number. Make it a uuid and put a qr code on the inside of the back cover for easy data entry.

"Just adding more digits" ignores the whole point of the problem: That ISBNs live within (a subset of) the number space of EAN codes, which are used globally for all sorts of products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Article_Number

And that software systems all over the planet are built to handle specific numbers in specific formats. "Just add more digits" requires a global shift to a new format, which will take many, many years to accomplish. The shift from ISBN-10 to ISBN-13 took years, and there are articles about "are you ready for ISBN-13?" out there. Like, this is a Y2K-type issue.

Sure, another expansion is inevitable, but if, like the author, your goal is to sell books in a lot of places right now, you need a number in a fairly limited scope of available numbers that work with distribution systems people actively have.

It'd be like if you told someone they didn't need an IPv4 address because IPv6 addresses were available. That's all fine and good unless you have customers on IPv4.

IPv6 people realised that technology enables exponential growth and made their space 79 billion billion billion times larger, unlike barcodes which only went 1000 times larger.

On the other hand people actually use 13 digit barcodes.

That's fine except the #1 reader of these codes are Point of Sales machines. Most of which can only read 2D barcodes and a specific subset of them at that. What you are describing would require almost every retail bookseller in the world who wants to sell these books to do a hardware upgrade.

Not to mention distributors and everyone else along the supply chain. And libraries.

And that's just the hardware. The software would need updating too as I guarantee you that most of it is written assuming ISBN format (length, checksum, character set, prefix, etc).

Sure there's someone that bought 1000 and is reselling them for a little more than $1 each?

I misread this as when to buy your own ICBM and was subsequently disappointed by the content

(Just in case) they are free in Canada.

Yeah, it was a bit of a mess getting all the paperwork done but when I was signing up for iBooks distribution back in ~2014, I secured a block of 10 easily, for free, as a Canadian publisher and could have received more with some evidence I'd need them. I expect it's up to the organization that administers the ISBN system in your country to set the price. ISBNs tend to vary by country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISBN_identifier_groups

They are free I think everywhere outside of the US. Except for China, where it's well over $1000 to buy one from a state-owned publisher.

free or almost free. In Italy, for example, it's 50€ for a block of ten codes.

The FAQ of the company responsible for selling ISBNs in Germany (1000 ISBNs cost ~310 EUR incl. VAT here) states that the country of the publisher is the decisive factor on where to buy the ISBNs. So if a book written by the author got translated to German, would he have to buy a German ISBN?

Otherwise he could just acquire all his ISBNs in Canada for free?

The article mentions that he can't resell them, which begs the questions: Why and how?

What is stopping me and the author from publishing a book _we_ wrote on an ISBN _he_ bought?

I'm guessing nothing.

Assuming that, where do we draw the line between co-author, editor, publisher and "guy who resold an ISBN"?

Maybe I'm naive, but the key takeaway from this for me was:

> the owner of the ISBN controls where the book can be printed.

I didn't realise this - that's the crucial "why" behind the "when".

Would it be possible to create a system that’s backwards compatible but costs something reasonable?

In a word, no. It’s the equivalent of IP space - it’s a fixed format (a subset of the EAN/UPC format) with a finite number of entries, and it’s a unique key, so there has to be a single issuing party.

Probably not. I suspect all the library information systems have been hardcoded for a fixed number of digits. It resembles the Y2K problem, or the IPv4 problem.

Then don't sell your book as a "book", but as an "object".

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