There has been a lot of discussion recently as to whether it makes sense (economically or logically) to assign a unique ISBN to every e-book format. The most recent discussion was on Twitter via the #ISBNhour hashtag.
The first problem is to determine how many different e-book formats there are. Does anyone actually know the answer? Without doing any research at all, I can think of these: MOBI/PRC, AZW, PDF, RTF, HTML, ePub, LIT, LRF, PDB. Maybe, just maybe, that represents 20 or 25 percent of the possibilities (does the new Vook count?).
In reality, as has been pointed out, the answer is probably quite different for small publishers than it is for the big outfits. Most small publishers sell their e-books off our own websites, Amazon’s Kindle Store, and a few of the indie-friendly online e-book retailers. And most of us have a small block of ISBNs (a block of 10 or 100) and are reluctant to part with the funds for a larger block.
We already know we have to have a different ISBN for the various print versions of a book — one each for the trade paperback, hardcover, and large print versions.
If we sell an e-book of the same content on Amazon’s Kindle Store, it makes little sense to waste an ISBN on it, since Amazon will assign the book its own unique ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) and won’t use whatever ISBN we assign to it, anyway.
But what we upload the book, in MOBI/PRC format, to Mobipocket? We need to give it some kind of unique identifier. That book will usually find its way onto Amazon’s Kindle Store (you can deselect that option but my experience is that it will show up on Amazon regardless). And what if I sell a DRM version in MOBI/PRC format on Mobipocket and offer the same content (also in MOBI/PRC format) on my own website without DRM? Two different ISBNs?
If I want to sell it on Barnes & Noble’s new ebook store, I have to assign it a unique ISBN.
And what if I package several e-book formats into one ZIP file and sell that directly to a customer? Does each format in the file require an ISBN or does only the compilation need one?
The BISG is pondering these issues, but admittedly their solutions seem best suited to the larger publishers.
So, what’s small indie publisher, or a self-publisher (who is really in a subset of all small indies), to do?
We need to evaluate how many ISBNs we would need to “do it right” and balance that against expected sales in each format and the cost of additional blocks of ISBNs.
I think our best solution at the moment is to assign two ISBNs to each book’s ebook formats — one for ePub (so you can easily work into B&N’s store) and another for all the other formats (except Kindle, which doesn’t need one). Then we should assign our own internal unique ID to each different format, maybe using a portion of the ISBN coupled with an alpha character for each different format.
What’s your opinion?
