Obtaining ISBNs for Your eBooks

Any author who is getting ready to self-publish their book or ebook needs to obtain an ISBN for each edition.

You have two options when it comes to this. You can shell out the cash to buy your own ISBN for around $125 (for one ISBN) or you can opt to be assigned a free ISBN through the publishing distribution channel you are using to make your book available for sale.

Barnes & Noble, CreateSpace and Lulu are just a few of the major print-on-demand companies that will assign your book a free ISBN when you publish it. ISBNs that are assigned for free should not put authors at any real disadvantage, as far as I can tell. Speaking from my own publishing experience, free and paid ISBNs are essentially equal in value.

However, Amazon Kindle eBooks are not offered a free ISBN.. ASINs are the numbers that Amazon uses to identify eBooks that do not already have an ISBN. Your “Amazon Standard Identification Number” is what Amazon uses to recognize your specific book, just like an ISBN would be used outside of Amazon.. You can find the ASIN for your eBook by looking at the URL of your product page and copying the numbers and letters after the last dash.

For instance, my eBook can be found on Amazon at the following URL: www.amazon.com/dp/B004C446IC and my ASIN is the B004C446IC portion of the URL.

Publishing your eBook in the Kindle store without obtaining an ISBN is not ideal, however.. You will still be able to publish and sell eBooks on Amazon, but don’t be surprised if you can’t list it on other sites or submit it for review without an ISBN..

What this means is that you will need to get a free ISBN from one of the other sites in order to list your book on these sites, since Amazon Kindle does not require or assign one. That just means your eBook will be available to buy on another site, which is never a bad thing.. No major thing there.

Since Amazon is clearly leading the publishing revolution right now, authors who are successfully selling eBooks for the Kindle may have less of a reason to bother with an ISBN..