
When to Buy Your Own ISBNs - janvdberg
https://mwl.io/archives/3982
======
cwmma
Fun fact: the 13 digit ISBNs are actually UPCs (aka bar codes) but with the
country code set to "Bookland"

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookland)

~~~
amelius
Does this scale? What are the country codes for Computerland, Phoneland,
Chairland, Deskland?

~~~
mattkrause
There is a Musicland (979) but Bookland seems to “invaded” parts of its
namespace!

These are hacks so that you only need one table rather than separate lists of
ISBNs and EANs. Chairs (etc) didn’t have a pre-existing registry so....no need
Chairland.

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neurocline
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.

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baroffoos
Its 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.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
To 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
Just 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
"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.

~~~
mavhc
IPv6 people realised that technology enables exponential growth and made their
space 79 billion billion billion times larger, unlike barcodes which only went
1000 times larger.

On the other hand people actually use 13 digit barcodes.

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jshaqaw
I misread this as when to buy your own ICBM and was subsequently disappointed
by the content

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lazyant
(Just in case) they are free in Canada.

~~~
girzel
They are free I think everywhere outside of the US. Except for China, where
it's well over $1000 to buy one from a state-owned publisher.

~~~
blue1
free or almost free. In Italy, for example, it's 50€ for a block of ten codes.

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wodenokoto
The article mentions that he can't resell them, which begs the questions: Why
and how?

What is stopping me and the author from publishing a book _we_ wrote on an
ISBN _he_ bought?

I'm guessing nothing.

Assuming that, where do we draw the line between co-author, editor, publisher
and "guy who resold an ISBN"?

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phab
Maybe I'm naive, but the key takeaway from this for me was:

> the owner of the ISBN controls where the book can be printed.

I didn't realise this - that's the crucial "why" behind the "when".

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simplecomplex
Would it be possible to create a system that’s backwards compatible but costs
something reasonable?

~~~
amelius
Probably not. I suspect all the library information systems have been
hardcoded for a fixed number of digits. It resembles the Y2K problem, or the
IPv4 problem.

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amelius
Then don't sell your book as a "book", but as an "object".

