Amazon’s Sly Little Stunt With ISBNs. In another thread here on TW the perennially thorny subject of ISBNs came up. Amazon, Apple and Nook famously do not require them for indie ebooks, but if you want to get into retailers like Scribd and Oyster, or Flipkart, or the wholesale catalogues like OverDrive and Ingram, they are a must. Smashwords provides them free. But you pay the price in being “published” by Smashwords. Ditto with CreateSpace. Jim Giammatteo will be covering the importance of ISBNs (and be assured they are VERY important) in another post. Here to look at just two things – how indies might beat the pricing problem, and how Amazon abuses ISBNs for its own ends. If you live in Canada, Australia or New Zealand then you can get ISBNs for free. If you live in the UK or USA you get fleeced by the two ISBN monopolies, Nielsen (UK) and Bowker (US). In the UK Nielsen will charge you £78 GBP for ten ISBNs. £7.80 each, but ten is the minimum you can buy. You can buy 100 for £264, bringing the unit price down to just £2.64. Or you can buy 1,000 for £792 and bring the unit cost down to just 80p each. Buy 10,000 or more, and the price comes down to pennies. Similar prices apply in the US through Bowkers. You can currently buy 1000 ISBNs for $1 each, buy you need to put a grand up front to get them. And as of October 1st the b******s put the price up to $1,500. In both instances the system absolutely fleeces indie authors. It’s criminal. ISBNs simply are not a realistic expenditure for indies with a handful of titles that will probably struggle to sell on the smaller platforms that require them. With Amazon, Nook and Apple all happy to bypass ISBNs its a tough decision to make, even if you are lucky enough to have the cash available, which many of us arent. But make that decision based on your circumstances. Don’t fall for the Amazon cheerleader drivel that ISBNs are irrelevant. Yes, Bowker and Nielsen are fleecing us, but that doesn’t change the key role ISBNs play, as Jim will be explaining. One way around it is for indies to get together and buy a job lot between them and then share them out. It’s not an ideal solution, as it will mean one publisher “imprint brand” for all the books using them, but if something innocuous and bland is chosen – TWAHA Books, for example – it’s not a big problem. Ten authors could club together to get ten ISBNs each for at just £2.60 a piece instead of £ 7.80 a time. Why would you need ten? Because the “rules” are that every format variant of a book needs its own ISBN. Ebook? That’s one ISBN. POD? That’s another. PDF? That’s another. In the UK Nielsen are even trying to insist that an epub and a mobi need a separate ISBN each! The Amazon-affiliate blog The Passive Voice ran a post last week about the pending Bowker price rise, and in the comments pretty much everyone jumped in to explain how utterly irrelevant ISBNs were. Ponder this: Thomas & Mercer, as we all know, is an Amazon imprint. Amazon, as we all now, does not require ISBNs. As Passive Guy and Konrath et al will tell you, ISBNs are a part of the “legacy system” and have no place in the ebook world. As it says on the Bowker home page, “The ISBN identifies a book or other book-like product (such as an audiobook) in a specific format and edition.” So WTF do all Thomas & Mercer print and e-books have ISBNs on their title page? Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer cleverly use the PRINT allocated ISBN for their ebook imprint titles (totally ignoring the clear statement on the Bowker website that “If you wish to have a hard bound copy, a soft bound copy, an ePUB, a PDF, a MOBI, or even register a new version, you will need a unique ISBN for each version.” https://myidentifiers/isbn/main But why does Amazon bother at all? Because ISBNs help readers find you. To drive home this point I picked a best-selling Thomas & Mercer title. I won’t name it or the author here, but here’s the ISBN, as taken from the Look Inside feature on the Kindle ebook. ISBN 9781477817995 Just copy and paste that into your preferred search engine. What comes up is page after page after page of retail outlets where the print version of this book is available. Check out any Amazon imprint title and it’s the same story. Print ISBNs being used in the ebook, contrary to Bowker regulations. Or try this one – ISBN 1482374137. This is an indie title, and uses the CreateSpace free ISBN in the ebook. The author? Joe Konrath. In case you were wondering, the Amazon CreateSpace rules are quite clear - https://createspace/Products/Book/ISBNs.jsp - This ISBN can only be used with the CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Unless you are Joe Konrath, it seems. So let’s be clear, Amazon tells us indies we don’t need ISBNs, They actively discourage us from using them, except for the PODs. But all Amazon’s own imprint books and ebooks carry ISBNs and so do all the books of the Amazon cheerleaders. And they totally disregard the official guidelines and use the same ISBN for both print and ebook. Can we indies get away with just one ISBN for all variations of our product – ebook, POD, etc? Well, if it’s good enough for Amazon… Not that I’d outright recommend it, but worth thinking about. And maybe worth someone in the USA asking Bowker about this. Jim Giammatteo, maybe something you could take up with them? It would be really interested to get in writing why it is that the mighty Amazon, which can well afford to buy ISBNs by the gazillion at cents a time, can get away with using the print ISBN on its own ebooks when everyone else is being told they can’t.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 19:02:37 +0000
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