isbnlogmed[1] On Publishing Perspectives, independent publisher and e-book consultant Erik Christopher has an article looking at whether to assign separate ISBNs to individual e-book formats, and whether DRMed vs. non-DRMed e-books constitute separate formats.

Much of the debate about ISBNs and e-books stems from the use of the word “format.” The question being, when is an e-book in one format, say ePUB, no longer an ePUB? We know, for example, that a Kindle version is a new format, because it is no longer an ePUB file, but a unique version that will only work with Amazon’s software.

Actually, I thought much of the debate about ISBNs and e-books stemmed from the extravagant cost of getting each ISBN (though in September Bowkers did announce a dramatic ISBN price cut), and some small publishers feeling that insisting each format should have a new one was just a way for Bowkers to sell more of them. But I digress.

Christopher looks at how the iBookstore and Smashwords handle ISBN assignment, and ponders the question of whether EPUB + DRM could be considered a different format, for the purposes of ISBN assignment, than EPUB without.

The reason for assigning a separate ISBN to each format, he explains, is to make sales tracking easier, so as to be better able to judge the overall performance of a title.

In a comment, former Bowker President Michael Cairns links to an article he originally wrote for Foreword Magazine giving more background on the ISBN situation. Cairns notes that the Book Industry Study Group has commissioned a study on ISBN use (which is being conducted by Cairns himself) which will help it formulate a policy to reconcile the objectives of the ISBN community with market realities.

(We carried a piece by Cairns last year on whether the ISBN was “dead”.)

Did you know that “ISBN” stands for “International Standard Book Number,” so whenever someone says “ISBN number” they’re committing a redundancy?

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8 COMMENTS

  3. The entire issue of ISBNs with ebooks is a complete mystery to me. As I see it, there’s absolutely no reason for an ebook to have one, as the primary consideration with carrying one — to the best of my knowledge — is so that buyers can order/reorder a book.

    In what universe is this necessary for a digital product?

    The only answer, that makes any sense, is for Bowker to sell more ISBNs.

    • That’s half of it. But the other half is that it lets publishers track which formats of a book have been sold the most. The legacy systems that booksellers like Amazon have in place for reporting paper book sales figures by ISBN will work just as well for reporting sales of e-book by ISBN, even if no physical copies actually have to be “ordered”.

  4. Personally I don’t see a huge amount or merit in either the reordering or the sales figures reasons. I can however see an argument from the point of view of cataloguing and tracking over the longer term, rather than having to rely on book titles.

  5. It’s obvious that ebooks need some sort of tracking system so stores know what they’re selling and purchasers what they’re getting. It’s the only reliable way to compare an ebook being sold on Amazon with one being sold by B&N. What is far from obvious it that a scheme developed in the 1970s for physical bar codes on printed books makes sense for digital books in the twenty-first century.

    Bowker seems to have convinced the publishing industry’s corporate executives , many of who entered the industry in the 1970s, that ISBN is the way to go. (Except, of course, for Amazon, whose CEO didn’t get into book distribution until much later.) But I suspect that in a few years the already well-known inadequacies of ISBNs will result in some other and better designed standard being developed. Corporate executives who thought they were avoiding trouble by sticking with ISBNs with find themselves in double trouble. They’ll have to abandon ISBNs for something much better not when the market is small, but when it is large. It won’t be like leaving one rowboat for another. It’d be like moving all the passengers on one cruise ship to another.

    And for the record, the cost of ISBNs doesn’t bother me. I bought a set of 1,000 in 2000, shortly before Bowker jacked up the price. For a mere $600, I got more than I will ever need.

  6. Honestly, I don’t understand the furor over the price of ISBNs. The first block of 10,000 ISBNs we got lasted us several decades. The second block should last us 15-20 years. Perhaps this is a factor of scale (size of the publisher), but really, at least at this size of a block ISBNs are not very expensive.

  7. Using ISBNs to track sales may be part of the usage for publishers, but was not the reason for developing ISBNs back in the late 1960s.
    One of the problems the publishers created (and BTW still create) is their many editions of a book title: hardbound, paperback, study editions, etc. It was hard to know how to describe the book, bookstores and libraries wanted to order…or people wanting a special study edition of the same title, produced for a conference or with special addenda materials not found in the original. Having a number for a specific version of the book was far more useful than having to describe what one wanted with words.
    Initially Bowker (Books in Print and other reference books) did not sell the ISBNs, but eventually had to in order to pay for the process and database as more and more publishers came into existence.
    Unfortunately the cost of ISBNs apparently has some publishers unfortunately re-using the same ISBN for the different formats of the same title, completely messing up the ordering processes again as before ISBN. And some companies selling ISBNs, it turns out, are selling ISBNs to self publishers representing books of other nations, not something pristine that they bought from Bowker.
    Once in rare cases a publisher will use the same ISBN for two different books, so it’s a crap shoot as to what your order will end up looking like.

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