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U.S. ISBN Monopoly Denies Threat From Digital Self-Publishing
Ian Lamont writes "The Economist writes that self-publishing threatens the existence of the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) regimen, which is used to track and distribute printed books. Self-publishing of e-books has experienced triple-digit growth in recent years, and the most popular self-publishing platforms such as Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing don't require ISBNs (Amazon assigns its own reference number to these titles). But Bowker, the sole distributor of ISBNs in the United States, sees an opportunity in self-publishing. The packages for independent authors are very expensive — Bowker charges $125 for a single ISBN, and $250 for ten. It also upsells other expensive services to new and naive authors, including $25 barcodes and a social widget that costs $120 for the first year. Laura Dawson, the product manager for identifiers at Bowker, insists that ISBNs are relevant and won't be replaced anytime soon: 'Given how hard it is to migrate database platforms and change standards, I wouldn't expect to replace the ISBN, simply because it is also an EAN, which is an ISO standard that forms the backbone of global trade of both physical and digital items. There are a lot of middlemen, even in self-publishing. They require standards in order to communicate with one another.'"
It seems like a lot of programs/services just use ASINs (despite being controlled by a single private entity), probably indicating some deficiency with the current centralized registration regime. Back in 2005, Jimmy Wales suggested we needed something (culturally) similar to wikipedia for product identifiers. The O'Reilly interview indicates that the folks issuing ISBNs think DOIs are DOA too.
IOWANINOLS
They are used to dealing with big publishers. It is no surprise to me that they can offer those big publishers huge discounts on volume pricing, because this is the type of thing that doing once has roughly the same cost as doing in huge bulk.
So no, I'm sorry, I don't swallow the whole "very expensive" line or the "12,500%" markup bullshit in TFA. It's not markup. It's the cost. And you can get huge discounts if you buy in bulk. Just like about everything you buy at Costco.
Bowker may be a monopoly in the US, I don't know. . Every country has its own series. In Hong Kong the government (part of the public library system) issues ISBNs on demand, free I charge authors $20 to supply a HK ISBN if they don't want to get one themself. Amazon numbers work and are free, but of course you can only use them if you sell exclusively through Amazon. So it may not be such a great saving.
And I'm an ebook author!
With point to multi-point sourcing from someone as large as Amazon, why pay money for the ISBN number? You can get "found" easily enough.
It's a standard unique identifier recognized across the publishing business. While an ISBN doesn't mean much about the quality of the book (it could be total garbage, or worse) at least it ensures that people will have to fork over cash to get one - so you won't get millions of new spam ISBNs each day for example. And if identifiers were free, you'd probably have to use some scheme like GUID (randomly generated 128-bit identifiers) which are not human friendly, as anyone knows who has ever tried to clean out their Windows registry.
Amazon's scheme is vendor-specific, and so would O'Reilly's if Tim came up with one.
By putting an ISBN on your work, it is available in every wholesalers and retailer's database. Your book can be ordered anywhere by anyone. Amazon's identifier is for Amazon only.
Authors don't have to pay that much for an ISBN when they self publish. Lulu.com for instance charges $40 for a "global distribution package" which includes an ISBN.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
$125 for one ISBN is only "very expensive" when you consider that ten ISBNs is $250. There are plenty of people who are willing to sell you an extra ISBN for cheap.
That said, $125 for an ISBN is only "very expensive" in a country where the average person spends less than $125 for a bag of groceries. Which ain't this one.
On a broader level, one of most baffling things to me has been how little people are willing to invest in their own futures. They'll spend $1,500 on an HDTV, but spend $125 for an ISBN -- when publishing their novel is presumably one of their lifelong dreams -- hell no! I can't afford it! It's so much money! I've listened to long harangues from musicians about how unjust the music industry is, and it turns out all they need is $2,500 to put out an album that's already been written AND recorded. I just can't understand it -- if it's that important to you, if this is what you really want to do with your life, why wouldn't you just put $2,500 on your credit card and damn the consequences? Honestly, I've made my living as a writer for well over a decade now, so I know what it's like to make no money at all ... but $2,500 is such an inconsequential amount of funds to spend on your own dreams that I just can't comprehend anybody complaining about it. In this society, $2,500 is the kind of money you don't even need to ask somebody for ... just fill out a form, they'll send you a card, and you can get a $2,500 loan -- or more -- without ever looking a human in the eye. So ... we're bitching about $250 now? No wait... we're apparently bitching about $125?
Breakfast served all day!
Why can't publications have something like GUID?
Ezekiel 23:20
The packages for independent authors are very expensive — Bowker charges $125 for a single ISBN,
This isn't expensive, do you know how much it costs to have an artist draw a cover? For an author, the biggest expense is publisher fees. If you're lucky, they'll only take around 40% of each book you sell. So if you're planning on selling more than 20 copies of your books, then an ISBN number isn't the biggest expense already.
And that's only if you want to be picky about your ISBN. If you don't care who is listed as the publisher, CreateSpace will give you an ISBN for free.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And unnecessary. Get rid of it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
With the explosion in books and book-like devices, the current ISBN scheme is insufficient. We'll soon be facing a world-wide ISBN shortage, especially in the rapidly expanding Asian publishing markets. I am promoting a new long-term solution called ISBNv6, which will provide a 128-bit-long space for book identifiers.
#DeleteChrome
Aren't GUIDs free, and ubiquitous on Microsoft platforms, what... 20 years ago?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Especially for digital books, but to be used on the digital information that a regular book is printed from... a cryptographic hash of the book is the book identifier. Decentralized, unlikely to have a number collision, and the added bonus of a mechanism to make sure that the book you received is the book you wanted. The only thing that needs to be centralized is the decision of which hash to use, how to hash the data, and how to represent the hash as to the user.
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
Laura Dawson, the product manager for identifiers at Bowker, insists that ISBNs are relevant and won't be replaced anytime soon
When you have to insist that your product is relevant, that's a bad sign.
Make an MD5 hash of the book's contents.
These days, sure that kind of money seems like nothing. But back when I was young, I dealt with the whole starving artist thing. Money was super tight, living paycheck to paycheck. $125 for a bag of groceries? More like $20-40 for the week. And $2500 to record an album, that was more than my car cost then. A simple cheap car repair was able to devastate my budget. You're working on the basis that self-published authors have decent jobs. So yes, $125 is something to bitch about. That's a lot of money when you're scraping by and trying to get your first bits of work out there. Especially when you know that early in your self-publishing career, it's very likely it might not even sell enough to recoup that, even if the work is good.
Well not really. I work for a company that's part of a large group, and one of the group's subsidiaries is a massive publisher of legal books. My question is: is it worthwhile to get these books onto DOI, host them online, and then somehow drive sales through this? In the DOI documentation, while I've not searched extensively, it seems there's no built-in mechanism for purchases.
Is this worthwhile to pursue?
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
I've listened to long harangues from musicians about how unjust the music industry is, and it turns out all they need is $2,500 to put out an album that's already been written AND recorded. I just can't understand it -- if it's that important to you, if this is what you really want to do with your life, why wouldn't you just put $2,500 on your credit card and damn the consequences?
Boy, that's some assumption you're making there. Are you really so out of touch that you just assume every musician must have a credit card, let alone one with $2500 or more credit left on it? I wish you the best with your writing career, but you need to familiarize (or perhaps re-familiarize) yourself with the term "starving artist". It doesn't matter that you were once broke yourself, the fact remains that for a whole lot of musicians, especially those just starting out in the biz, or who come from low-income neighborhoods, yes, that kind of money is indeed going to be totally out of the question. If they do happen to have a credit card, it's already maxed out, believe me. Following your dreams is just not all that easy in modern-day America, not if you're one of the 99%.
I was in publishing for a long time. The whole ISBN system is a major ripoff designed to fatten their wallets. It is much like, but much worse, than the domain name scam. There is no justification for the $10/year cost of domain names and no justification for the $125 to $25 cost of ISBN numbers. That is, no justification other than that they have a monopoly and can charge dang well what they please. Time to crush these monopolies.
So yes, $125 is something to bitch about. That's a lot of money when you're scraping by and trying to get your first bits of work out there. Especially when you know that early in your self-publishing career, it's very likely it might not even sell enough to recoup that, even if the work is good.
Realistically, if you have no other income than self publishing, you are dead broke and you should get a job flipping burgers and write on your time off. I know a lot of authors, literally hundreds, since I work in publishing. Only a handful make a living out of it. Most of those started as journalists. Not one could pay the rent from self publishing. And here, ISBNs are free, and printing is very cheap. It's marketing that's hard, and self publishing means you have a hundred times as much competition.
Realistically, if you have no other income than self publishing, you are dead broke and you should get a job flipping burgers and write on your time off.
I know a couple of dozen people making their living from self-publishing, none of them the 'best-sellers' you see stories about on the web. That's a small fraction of the number of people who've self-published, but they're doing much better than a new trade-published writer with a $5,000 advance... or the hordes of wannabe trade-published writers sending out their books for years hoping that someone will eventually give them that $5,000 advance.
I worked for the European branch of a US-based publisher. Head office decided that to save a few bucks they would re-use ISBNs rather than buy more. I tried really hard to explain why, given that our entire inventory, sales, royalty and accounting systems used the ISBN as the primary/foreign key on all book-related tables, this was a bad idea. They went ahead anyway.
The choice of key wasn't mine and was too deeply embedded to change, at least it would cost a *lot* more than new ISBNs for new titles.
Because ISBN numbers are also a unique identifier; they fulfil bibliographic and cataloguing functions. With an ISBN number you not only know what book is being referenced, but also which edition of that book, and what format that book was in (a book published as an eBook and as a paper book will have different ISBN number for both).
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Because ISBN numbers are also a unique identifier; they fulfil bibliographic and cataloguing functions.
But who needs old school bibliographic and cataloguing functions for self-published books when we have URLs for citation, search engines and social networks to find new material, and any number of services that authors can use to collect payment in return for supplying an electronic copy directly?
ISBNs are basically irrelevant to electronic self-publishers in the era of the World Wide Web, because you can supply a PDF or similar document as easily as an HTML page.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
$125 for a single ISBN is very expensive. In The Netherlands a single ISBN is €9.07 ($11.79).
https://portal.boekhuis.nl/isbn/informatie/tarieven
What is the making cost of the ISBN? i.e. cost of raw materials, cost of transporting it to the customer etc?
What if they charged 10000$ for an ISBN. Then you would say people buy a car for 15000$ but aren't willing to spend 10000$ for an ISBN.
No, it is expensive. Something doesn't become not expensive because other non-comparable stuff is more expensive.
You are comparing the cost of something which costs nothing to make, nothing to transport with something which involves time spent by a skilled artist.
Hashes collide.
There are far simpler solutions which actually don't have such problems.
Laak ah sed. Yo ain't need no pay nobody foh ISBNs bro.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
My Canadian friend got her own ISBN prefix for free, so she can publish as many books as she wants, all with matching ISBN prefix. But me, I have to pay a hundred bucks per book, and my ISBN's won't match. Typical US privatization bullshit highway robbery, just like the private cell networks and private medical care. These are not private sector pursuits, they are infrastructure that enables more and better private sector pursuits.
> Realistically, if you have no other income than self publishing, you are dead broke
> and you should get a job flipping burgers and write on your time off.
Take out “self“ and it is just as true and just as stupid.
You're forgetting that many authors today have published both ways. There is not necessarily a bunch of self-publishers separate from everyone else.
Print publishing collapsed for good in 2009. The cost of paper is 200% the cost of a book. There are hundreds of thousands of missing books — books that should have been published by a healthy publishing industry but were not simply because of paper costs. We published fewer and fewer books every year of the 21st century, not because people were reading less, but because paper was too expensive.
Now, a writer can write his or her manuscript, hire an editor, drop the manuscript into iBooks Author and/or export it from Pages as ePub, and publish a book where they keep 70% of retail. A print book might be 5% for the writer, or less. And with iBooks Author, you can do interactivity, audio, video, 3D — you can for example do a cookbook that is part cookbook and part cooking show, with interactivity that asks you how many you want to serve and then does the math on the recipe so your ingredients are exactly right, and even links you out to an online service that will deliver those ingredients. That is the kind of thing that makes readers reach for their wallets.
So even though my print books were done by a giant publisher and sold in dozens of countries and translated into 25 languages, my electronic books make me more money, and are much more fun to make, much more creative.
There are authors making $1 million per year from Kindle romance novels. I never heard of a romance writer making $1 million lifetime in print books.
So I sympathize somewhat with your negativity because yes, publishing as an industry is fucked right now. However, I think we are just in a transition between print and digital, and readers are sick of the tired content on the Web and more and more people want to pay a cheap price for something great rather than get something awful for free. So it is getting better and I think the industry will be healthy soon, when it takes advantage of digital instead of fighting it, and when even more people have iPads with Retina Display. Buying and reading books on iPad is easier than surfing the Web, and even with low cover prices, we can make more money than expensive print books.