TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘ISBN’ Category

By Chris Meadows

Publishing Perspectives has an article looking at the current problematic nature of the ISBN system when it comes to e-books. The article is a good summary of the situation as it now stands, summing up the ongoing debate between whether to give each format of an e-book its own separate ISBN, or assign one ISBN to the entire book.

Publishers tend to favor the single ISBN approach, while booksellers and wholesalers want one for each format. Perhaps not surprisingly—publishers are the ones who would have to pay for the ISBNs, after all, whereas retailers would get the most benefit from having separate unique identifiers for sales tracking. There is even a suggestion to issue separate ISBNs by region to make tracking regional sales easier.

The article says that “the International ISBN Agency and standards body EDItEUR hope to develop a web service whereby supply chain partners can easily request and receive format-level ISBNs from publishers”. In September, Bowkers announced it would be cutting the prices of ISBNs considerably.

One unrelated interesting thing I found in the article was this:

HarperCollins UK gives one ISBN to its e-books in epub format, which is the only format it sells. Says Graham Bell, head of publishing systems at HCUK: “We sell an epub to Amazon, and they sell it on to the consumer in a lightly modified version. Because Amazon sells the Kindle version exclusively, there’s no need for a different ISBN. We know that an Amazon sale is a Kindle sale.” The same will be true of iBooks sold by Apple.

A “lightly modified EPUB”? Really? Given that the Kindle is not compatible with EPUB, that must be some “modification”.

In a separate editorial/comment thread starter, Edward Nawotka asks whether separate ISBNs are really needed. It will be interesting to see the answers.

By Paul Biba

The Book Industry Study Group is reporting that the Agency has issued its position paper and reaffirmed its 2005 recomendation that ISBNs be assigned to different forms of electronic publication. This is a controversial topic, as many epublishers resent the extra expense of additional ISBNs. This expense can climb further if one considers that each version of an ebook, i.e., Epub, Mobi, html, etc. should be assigned a different ISBN.

For more information check the article here. Thanks to Resource Shelf for the tip.

By Paul Biba

We’ve had some discussion on the site about ISBNs and how necessary or unnecessary they are, especially in the ebook context. It’s not a subject I know much about, but LJNDawson.com has an interesting article. On the whole she seems to be in favor of them. Her article covers the following myyths:

ISBNs are expensive

You don’t need them if your books are digital

Amazon doesn’t use them so you don’t need them

Consumers don’t search using them

You can find the full text here.

By David Rothman

The BISG Web presentation is here. See earlier item. (Via PersonaNonData.)

By Paul Biba

I picked up the below press release from LJNDawson. It isn’t on Bowker’s site yet.

In 2010, the U.S. ISBN Agency will change its pricing models for ISBNs to accomodate the digital identification needs of authors, publishers, libraries and the supply chain at large. Unit prices all ISBN prefixes will be discounted by as much as 50% from the currently established rate structure, with additional discounts applied to large volume purchases.

At Bowker, we recognize the emergent need for a more economical solution for the practical and responsible identification of digital content and products. ISBN price decreases, however, are one of many necessary paradigm shifts that are necessary for the supply chain to effectively identify and catalogue digital assets for discovery and trading purposes.

See also this article from Reuters sent to me by Ian Sullivan.
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By Paul Biba

This is from the Book Industry Study Group. I can’t seem to get to their website, but PersonaNonData has a link to register there:

The book industry has had the ISBN for nearly 40 years; there has been little cause for excitement. Now, suddenly the whole subject of “identifiers” has become a hot topic, particularly when it comes to digital books and other online resources. This BISG Webcast will explore why the book industry has standard identifiers, and consider the future of the ISBN (International Standard Book Number), as well as the role of newer identification standards like ISTC (International Standard Text Code) and ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier). What do you need to know to make informed decisions about how — and whether — to use them?

By Roger Sperberg, New York Editor for TeleRead

In the United States, small publishers have a significant levy placed on them if they obtain an ISBN for every format in which they issue an e-book. A publisher like Random House might pay only five or ten cents for each ISBN it assigns. On the other end of the spectrum, a new e-book publisher must either pay $1120 upfront for one hundred ISBNs or $325 for ten at a time as it goes along. As we all know, there are vastly more than ten e-book formats so this is a sticky point.

Bookstores have long declined to sell print books without an ISBN, a reality of entering the book-distribution chain that new commercial ventures have simply had to accept. For physical objects — items that pass across a checkout counter’s barcode scanner — there’s no getting around it.

But inventory management is irrelevant to e-books, which aren’t barcode scanned, and so an ISBN (more…)

By a TeleBlog Contributor

Editor’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 its own place as a separate article. Many thanks to both Elizabeth and Brian for their contributions on this issue. PB

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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