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This article expended a lot of text and avoided the actual useful information. - 1 ISBN costs $125 - 10 ISBNs cost $250 - 100 ISBNs cost $575 - 1000 ISBNs cost
by neurocline 8y ago
This article expended a lot of text and avoided the actual useful information.
- 1 ISBN costs $125
- 10 ISBNs cost $250
- 100 ISBNs cost $575
- 1000 ISBNs cost $1000
So if you are fairly sure to self-publish more than 8 books in your lifetime, of course you would buy a thousand of them.
- kuhhk 8y agoCan you resell these ISBNs? Edit: Nevermind, I missed it in the article. The author says he can't.
- hexane360 8y agoWhy not buy 100 of them? How many individuals have actually published more than 100 books?
- gwern 8y agoIt sounds like it's not 1 ISBN per book, it's one ISBN per printing/publisher of each book. If you have 9 books and 9 publishers in different countries print them once and then in some countries they get reprinted/resold later on by a different publisher...
- blue1 8y agoNot just that, even different editions By the same publisher must have different ISBNs. It is even recommended that every electronic format of the same book should have a different ISBN (though I see many publishers not doing that).
- Dylan16807 8y agoThe article is pretty clear about intending to use the same ISBN for different printers. So 9 numbers, not 81. Their primary goal is to capture the value of having the same ISBN in different channels.
- baroffoos 8y agoIts an absolute scam that you have to pay $125 for a number. I can understand some small fee for keeping a system to track them running but anything more than a few dollars for a block is an outrage.
- nabla9 8y agoIt's almost like cryptocurrency. Keeping the number small makes is scare. If you put price on it, people don't waste them. ISBN issuance is country-specific, however. Different countries have different ways to issue them. Many give them free.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoTo be fair: We have more or less pretty much run out of them, so preventing their waste or misuse is worthwhile. (Much like with IPv4 addresses.) Yes, we've now grabbed 979 of the ISBN-13 space, in addition to the more or less full 978 space, but that merely doubles the ISBN space, since many of the other prefixes are used for other products in EAN. Sure, we can always devise new solutions when these numbers run out as well, but there's a lot of order system overhead to such things.
- baroffoos 8y agoJust add more digits to the number. Make it a uuid and put a qr code on the inside of the back cover for easy data entry.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago"Just adding more digits" ignores the whole point of the problem: That ISBNs live within (a subset of) the number space of EAN codes, which are used globally for all sorts of products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Article_Number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Article_Number And that software systems all over the planet are built to handle specific numbers in specific formats. "Just add more digits" requires a global shift to a new format, which will take many, many years to accomplish. The shift from ISBN-10 to ISBN-13 took years, and there are articles about "are you ready for ISBN-13?" out there. Like, this is a Y2K-type issue. Sure, another expansion is inevitable, but if, like the author, your goal is to sell books in a lot of places right now, you need a number in a fairly limited scope of available numbers that work with distribution systems people actively have. It'd be like if you told someone they didn't need an IPv4 address because IPv6 addresses were available. That's all fine and good unless you have customers on IPv4.
- chrischen 8y agoSure there's someone that bought 1000 and is reselling them for a little more than $1 each?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]