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E-books and ISBNs, by Brian Green, Executive Director, International ISBN Agency

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

By a TeleBlog Contributor

ISTC_logo_topleft.gifEditor’s note: Brian submitted this article to me and was unsure as to whether he should actually submit it as a comment to Elizabeth Burton’s article. I thought the subject important enough that it deserved it’s own place as a separate article. Many thanks to both Elizabeth and Brian for their contributions on this issue.

E-books and ISBNs

I would like to clear up some misapprehensions in Elizabeth Burton’s contribution on ISBNs for e-books.

ISBN is a voluntary standard

First, let me emphasise that ISBN is an ISO standard and, like all ISO standards, is voluntary with no legal compulsion to implement it. It is normally the major customers and supply chain who demand adoption of standards in order to provide greater efficiencies and this has certainly been the key to the success of the ISBN over the last 40 years.

This is not an issue that has only been “pushed in the US for several months”. The insistence on separate ISBNs for each format goes back to the original ISBN ISO standard in 1970 and was applied explicitly to electronic publications in the revision of 2005 which stated that ‘each different format of an electronic publication that is published and made separately available shall be given a separate ISBN.’ (N.B. Paul Durrant: this means that multiformat e-books, as you suggest, only need a single ISBN if they are not made separately available.) It is worth mentioning that the ISO working party that drafted this revision included representatives of major US booksellers, wholesalers, librarians and publishers.

Why assign ISBNs to each format?

The reasons for separately identifying different formats are broadly similar to those for identifying different physical formats. Ease of discovery of the different formats available, ease of trading and the possibility of collecting detailed sales data. If these are not considerations, for example where publishers are selling e-books exclusively from their own websites or through another single channel and do not wish to have them listed in books in print databases then, as Liz notes, publishers may not wish to bother with ISBNs. However, publishers should beware of taking a short-term view that makes them reliant on a single channel.
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