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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
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.
According to TFA, the ISBN is international; but for whatever historical reason 1 entity per country(no word on what happened to countries that have ceased to exist or come to exist since 1959, though those probably aren't hotbeds of writing and publishing...) was made the local monopoly distributor for that country.
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!
That's kind of what an ISBN is, right?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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
More or less the same applies here in Sweden: I applied for a few ISBNs, and was given two with no fuss. The total cost to me was I had to write two emails, and read some instructions. No money was involved in the transaction. I don't see why this should change should I need more ISBNs in the future.
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.
Cost? What are they using to generate the numbers, a hand cranked analytical engine?
So are ISBNs, in many parts of the world. I guess the US has left it to the free market to decide how much the should cost.
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.
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.
There is no justification for the $10/year cost of domain names
Good domain names are a limited resource (sure there are a gazillion possible combinations but nobody wants to be kz67uip95zqtn.com or johnsmithfrompowercablenebraskabutnottheonthatlivesonwashingtonstreet.org). Until we live in some post-scarcity socialist nirvana where our disputes can be mediated by infinitely wise AIs then they will have a value. (...and even then, look at how long the names get in Banks's Culture books!)
If domain names were free, or lasted forever for a small fee, then the cybersquatters would be busy running scripts to systematically register every likely combination of English words , and you'd all have to buy back your domains from them for whatever they wanted to charge. The domain name market is Wild West enough at the moment, thanks very much.
At least a monopoly has some sort of accountability.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
While my assuming that you know what you're talking about is probably unwise, the fact that you identified a conjunction as a preposition bodes ill.
$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
Essentially this is a fairly standard "everything should be private and for profit" attitude prevalent in US.
In most of the rest of the world, ISBNs are distributed cheap or even free to authors, typically at a cost of requesting them and maybe paying some small processing fee.
If prices of ISBN codes were really a problem, people could just publish in France, where ISBNs are free. Anyways nowadays ISBN are just a particular class of GTIN/EAN so I suspect one could just buy an EAN (UPC) code.
How do you know $125 is the actual cost of one ISBN? There is no market for ISBN's, only a monopoly.
In Canada and many other countries, the cost of one ISBN is free. A whole ISBN prefix can be had for free. There ends up being no excuse not to apply an ISBN, and so all books have ISBN's, and everybody benefits.
> Costco
What has a private grocery store got to do with public infrastructure like ISBN's? An ISBN costs nothing to create, and you can't eat it. We put them on books not for our own private interest, but for the good of society and culture. So you can find a specific book 20 years from now. So retailers can save time and money in administrative costs and put that into better serving readers.
A much better analogy is Social Security Numbers. You don't want to have one, but you have one for the benefit of the whole society. What possible benefit would there be to charging people to obtain a Social Security Number? We want them to have a job, we want them to be uniquely identified in the Social Security database.
I also don't think you understand that books have multiple ISBN's. So we are talking about $250 per title. For what?