Should you buy your own ISBN or allow your POD publisher to assign one of theirs? Does it really matter in the end?

There’s been a lot of talk online about how owning your own ISBN is a benefit. An ISBN, for those who don’t know, stands for International Standard Book Number, and is essentially a product ID. You need one to sell a book through a retail channel, such as a bookstore.

The conventional wisdom is that a self-published author needs to actually purchase an ISBN for his or her book. In other words, the author actually owns the ISBN. In fact, one POD service company is touting the ability to sell single ISBNs directly to authors.

The ability to purchase single ISBNs from this POD service company has been heralded by some as a great, liberating event for self-published authors. Previously, an author had to go directly to RR Bowker, the only agency allowed to sell ISBNs, and buy at least a block of 10 numbers (though rumor is you could by single ISBNs if you knew who to contact).

The purpose of an ISBN is to identify the supplier of a book. The actual owner of the ISBN and the owner of the book do not have to be the same entity, even though historically in publishing they have been. An author who self-publishes and retains all rights still owns and controls the book, regardless of who owns the ISBN.

So the premise I put forth is that, if an author goes to a POD service company, he or she does so for the purpose of that company doing the order fulfillment. And if that is the case, then there is no benefit for the author to own the ISBN. It is just a number for facilitating the ordering process, which the author has by default elected not to be part of.

Before I get into the details of my reasoning, here is a tutorial on the relationship between a book’s ISBN and the traditional book distribution system.

BookLocker uses Ingram, the world’s largest book distributor, to distribute its books. The ISBN record at Ingram for a book shows BookLocker as the supplier of that book, and it does so even if an author used his or her own ISBN. (Booklocker.com is one of the only POD publishers that allows authors to use their own ISBN if they choose to do so.) This is logical, as Ingram needs to know who to go to when they need more copies of a book. And since it is our job to deal with Ingram, BookLocker is who they come to.

There is also a directory called Books-In-Print, which is put out by RR Bowker - the United States ISBN agency. And ISBN record in Books-In-Print lists only the publisher, not the supplier. And the “publisher” in Books-In-Print is whoever bought the ISBN from RR Bowker. The founding assumption of Books-In-Print is that the owner of the ISBN is both the publisher and supplier of a book. This was, of course, true for many years as there were no other publishing options for an author. It is not true today, as it is now possible to separate the two roles by using a POD service company.

Another important point - if the POD service company owns the ISBN, it creates the records at Ingram and Books-In-Print. If the author owns the ISBN, he or she only creates the record at Books-In-Print, not Ingram (this will be important later, when I explain how to take a book out-of-print).

So, the information to take away from the explanation above is that there are really two database records for a book if it is published through a POD service company that uses Ingram - one at Ingram and one at RR Bowker.

How does this play out in the real world?

Most bookstores order from Ingram. (Borders is an exception. They also will order from Ingram, but tend to also contact publishers directly through their listing in Books-In-Print.) When a bookstore calls Ingram for a book, Ingram goes to the supplier listed in the ISBN record. If that same bookstore looks the book up in Books-In-Print instead, the order gets routed to whomever the publisher is (AKA the owner of the ISBN) because that’s the contact information in Books-In-Print.

Now, when you remove a book from the system, that book’s ISBN is essentially “decommissioned”. It cannot be reused, even if nothing in the book or on the cover has changed. If the supplier changes, the ISBN must changed. However, the ISBN record isn’t deleted. It’s changed to say “out of print” or “unavailable.” Remember a few paragraphs back when I explained that if the POD service company owns the ISBN it creates the records at Ingram and Books-In-Print? Well, when you remove a book, the POD service company changes the ISBN record in both places. When the author owns the ISBN, the POD service company can only change the ISBN record at Ingram. The author has to change the record in Books-In-Print. This is how a book can be listed as both “out-of-print” and “in print” at the same time. It depends on where the party ordering the book looks.

Moreover, Amazon.com, BN.com and most of the online bookstores get their book information from the ISBN record at Ingram, NOT from Books-In-Print. So if a book is out-of-print in Ingram’s database, then it is also listed as out-of-print in every store to which Ingram supplies books.

Here is my reasoning as to why using your own ISBN, when you are also using a POD service company, is a mute point…

Let’s assume you are an author, using your own ISBN. You take that ISBN to a POD service company and set up a book with them. A year later, you decide you want to leave and form your own publishing company. The only way you can keep that book’s ISBN active when you publish the book through your new company is if you:

a.) don’t want to sell through Ingram or any of its partners (Amazon.com, BN.com and most of the online bookstores)

b.) you only use a traditional, offset printer; or a POD printer not associated with Ingram.

The reason is that the ISBN is now dead in the Ingram system (remember, the POD service company had to decommission the ISBN when you left).

Furthermore, if you try to submit that ISBN into Ingram’s system, or the system of any of Ingram’s partners, you’ll create a conflict that causes the old book information to reactivate and/or prevents the new book from appearing. (There can only be one record associated with an ISBN, and, per our example, you already created a record when you signed up with the POD service company a year ago.)

Basically, unless you are willing to give up most of your sales outlets, you must assign a new ISBN.

Now, this specific POD service company who is selling individual ISBNs to authors claims the author can take the ISBN with them when they leave. How can they do this, given what I just explained above? The sources I asked said there is a process whereby the author “proves” he or she owns the ISBN, and thus is allowed to keep the ISBN active in the Ingram system. However, this source also stated the process is far from perfect. Getting Ingram’s partners to change what they need to change is very difficult, and in some situations it may never get changed.

So the moral of the story is: if you are going the pure self-publishing route - forming a company, hiring a printer, negotiating with a distributor, and fulfilling customer sales yourself - then you absolutely need to have ownership of your ISBN. But if you are having your book printed by a POD service company - a company you go to specifically to handle all that backend stuff - don’t bother spending the extra money. If you ever leave, you really need to assign a new ISBN anyway.