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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.
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.
It's very expensive when you consider that ISBNs are free in many countries. Canada, for example, just requires you to register as a publisher, and then you can get as many ISBNs as you can use from a web site.
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.
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Wow, where can you do that? What distribution channels does that give you access to?
For a lot of types of music, there is no mass market. The "distribution channels" are MySpace, Facebook, and Amazon. The role of the record label is minimal.
I had one friend who managed to score a distribution deal with a pretty big indy distributor. It meant you could walk into any Virgin Megastore on Earth and buy his CD. But did you? No ... you didn't. Those CDs sat there for a few months and were rotated out for something else. Distribution channels aren't everything ... and this isn't the music industry of even a few years ago.
That said, realize that all a record label really is is a bank with a lot of connections. Everything a major record label "spends" on you ... for recording, mixing, mastering, distribution, promotion ... is really just a loan. Nothing is a gift. You get paid, but not before they've made back every penny they spent on you. Putting out an album with record label backing is 100% analogous to starting a company with VC funding.
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