e-Readers that don't require ISBN's

[jbcohen]

I'm with GA Russell, frankly my Libra Pro could care less, what it cares about is a format it can read.

Someone correct me if I am wrong but I believe the issue here is that some readers are tied to a specific company such as a kindle, the nook and nook color. The vast majority of the readers out there are not tied to any specific company such as the Jet Book, Jet Book Lite, Libra Pro, Literati, Bookeen and Lookbook. These readers simply could care less if the book has an ISBN, they care about the format of the book not the ISBN.

[kateharp]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

I'm with GA Russell, frankly my Libra Pro could care less, what it cares about is a format it can read.

Someone correct me if I am wrong but I believe the issue here is that some readers are tied to a specific company such as a kindle, the nook and nook color. The vast majority of the readers out there are not tied to any specific company such as the Jet Book, Jet Book Lite, Libra Pro, Literati, Bookeen and Lookbook. These readers simply could care less if the book has an ISBN, they care about the format of the book nto the ISBN.

-JBCohen has got it right. Well said. For me, someone who publishes a lot of long form articles, getting an ISBN for each one is a stretch. -Kate

[Worldwalker]

"In order to publish your work" isn't all that clear; when both the headline and the post itself say "e-readers" it's not even slightly obvious that the writer doesn't actually mean e-readers, but rather means online bookstores. The natural assumption is that she does, indeed, mean what she repeatedly said: e-readers.

And the "maybe I wasn't clear with my question" post was what I found insulting. She did not, in that post, clarify that despite her title and content, she was not actually talking about e-readers; she just said the same thing again, as if I could understand better it if she said it more (in person, she'd probably say it louder). "Sorry, I meant bookstores, not e-readers" would have been a clarification. Saying the same thing again was ... not.

If there was sufficient clarity in her first post to know what she meant -- in other words, that by saying "e-readers" instead of "bookstores" she actually meant bookstores instead of e-readers -- then why did anyone answer the question she asked instead of the one she thought of? It wasn't until her fourth post that she demonstrated she was really talking about bookstores, at which point Jehane explained the difference. Before that, it looked like she was accustomed to dealing with devices through some program that required an ISBN as part of its data, and would not accept a book without one, and thought that was a requirement of the device itself, so she wanted to know what e-readers wouldn't have the problem.

And as for publishing ... if I put this post in PDF format on my website, I've published it as an ebook. I doubt if anyone would want it, but I've published it just the same. No ISBN. My e-reader, a Sony PRS-505, could read it. So when she talked about publishing a book, and what e-readers don't require ISBNs, that was the sort of scenario that came to mind (though of course with something more substantive than a random MR comment!) and led, again, back to the topic of the thread: e-readers.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

Someone correct me if I am wrong but I believe the issue here is that some readers are tied to a specific company such as a kindle...

I believe that the Kindle is the only e-reader that's actually tied to a specific company, in that you have to email your own documents to an address at Amazon to have them loaded, and I'm not even sure about that. Maybe you can just hook up a cable, like you can with all the rest. (Kindle owners, help?) Just about every other device on the planet, though, you can hook a cable to and transfer your books, wherever they may be from. Most of them nowadays look like just another drive to your computer, too; you can just copy the books onto that drive, in the proper place of course, and there they are. And of course we calibre users just pick "send to device" and calibre does all the heavy lifting.

Taking my Sony as an example, I've never bought a book from the Sony online bookstore. I haven't had their software loaded since I discovered calibre, which was not long after I bought my 505. I recognize in principle that there are people who do buy all their books through Sony, but I don't buy that category of books (DRM-restricted books, to be exact) so I'm not one of them. On the other hand, I've bought a fair number of books and stories from authors on MobileRead (I was the one who first proposed the "self-promotion" forum, and there are times I regret it!), some through Smashwords, some from their own websites. Again, the Sony software doesn't come into it, nor does any linkage to Sony's overpriced, DRM-encumbered, dubiously-formatted, and generally execrable store.

So I think there needs to be a distinction between devices absolutely locked to a given vendor (possibly the Kindle), devices whose vendors have bookstores but which can use other book sources (PRS, nook), and devices which have no store at all (a lot). The first category contains either one or zero devices, and I think it's zero. If that is the case, and no device is irrevocably locked to its store, then no device requires an ISBN.

As an example of the latter case, I bought a story (Firemaggot) from Barbara Hambly a while back. It's quite a good story, by the way. She sells it (and others) directly from her website. There is no publisher, no ISBN, no bookstore limitation -- you just go to her site and buy the story.

In the case of the articles, and wanting to sell them through bookstores that require ISBNs, perhaps bundle them into books? Would a customer buy ten related articles at one time? I can't speculate fully effectively without knowing the subject of the articles, but let's say they're about houseplants (on my mind since I just watered the orchids): would someone who originally intended to buy just an article on the types of cyclamen also be interested in one on propagation of African violets, and maybe one on dwarf Sinningias? If so, not only might that work, but it might produce more revenue than selling the articles singly. Say that cyclamen customer might have intended to buy one article for $1, but if there were ten articles bundled together for $5, and two or three of those were of some interest (the others, to that customer who doesn't grow those plants, being dross) the customer would pay $5 instead of $1-$3.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

I believe that the Kindle is the only e-reader that's actually tied to a specific company, in that you have to email your own documents to an address at Amazon to have them loaded, and I'm not even sure about that. Maybe you can just hook up a cable, like you can with all the rest.

Kindle isn't tied to Amazon any more than Nook is tied to B&N. Everything can be side-loaded if you choose to. I choose to purchase some books from Amazon because it's convenient, but I'm not required to.

I know that Amazon requires an ISBN if you want to tie an ebook to the paper version of the same book. Otherwise, from what I know, Amazon will assign your book an ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number), which is just for Amazon's database purposes.

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

I believe that the Kindle is the only e-reader that's actually tied to a specific company, in that you have to email your own documents to an address at Amazon to have them loaded, and I'm not even sure about that. Maybe you can just hook up a cable, like you can with all the rest. (Kindle owners, help?) Just about every other device on the planet, though, you can hook a cable to and transfer your books, wherever they may be from. Most of them nowadays look like just another drive to your computer, too; you can just copy the books onto that drive, in the proper place of course, and there they are. And of course we calibre users just pick "send to device" and calibre does all the heavy lifting.

It's little different for Kindles, Worldwalker. The email route to getting stuff on the Kindle is a convenience, not a requirement. It's also a useful way of getting documents onto the Kindle which are not in a format the Kindle can handle natively - they go through an automatic conversion before being sent out to the Kindle. It's equally possible to simply plug the Kindle into your PC/Mac via USB and transfer documents directly to the appropriate directory on the Kindle (obviously having already ensured that the documents are in an appropriate format). The two main issues with the Kindle are that it can't handle EPUB format directly (needs to be converted to MOBI), and it can't read ebooks which are encrypted with non-Amazon DRM. But DRM-free MOBI files can simply be loaded via USB (or email) - I just bought a couple of C J Cherryh ebooks from the author's own website and side loaded them onto my Kindle and now very happily reading them.

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by queentess

I know that Amazon requires an ISBN if you want to tie an ebook to the paper version of the same book.

Not even then, Queentess. The key requirement there (to have the linking happen automatically) is simply that the author, title and series information match exactly. But even if they don't, you can still email KDP support and they'll link the versions up for you. No ISBNs required.

[BrianFreeman]

I think everyone on the publishing/selling side is still sorting out the ISBN situation for eBooks to some degree. Do you need a different ISBN for each FORMAT like you would with a print book? Or do you just need an ISBN for the eBook in general regardless of the actual format of the file? I think this will all be sorted out sooner than later because it's confusing right now...

Brian

[BrianFreeman]

Originally Posted by DMSmillie

Not even then, Queentess. The key requirement there (to have the linking happen automatically) is simply that the author, title and series information match exactly. But even if they don't, you can still email KDP support and they'll link the versions up for you. No ISBNs required.

Yep, that's been my experience as well. They were able to link-up some works that were published under slightly different names with no problem once I let them know.

Brian

[DMSmillie]

Actually, the 2005 ISO standard for ISBNs specifies that every distinct format of a book (including different electronic formats) should be given its own ISBN. The International ISBN Agency published a "position paper" in February 2010 on ebooks and ISBNs which is available online as a PDF:

E-Books and ISBNs: a position paper and action points from the International ISBN Agency

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by DMSmillie

It's little different for Kindles, Worldwalker. The email route to getting stuff on the Kindle is a convenience, not a requirement. It's also a useful way of getting documents onto the Kindle which are not in a format the Kindle can handle natively - they go through an automatic conversion before being sent out to the Kindle.

I was quite surprised to find out that it won't convert epub files, even though it will convert PDF if you put convert in the subject line. Since epub is a lot easier to convert than PDF, I would guess this is to put people off buying epubs from rival sites?

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by DMSmillie

Actually, the 2005 ISO standard for ISBNs specifies that every distinct format of a book (including different electronic formats) should be given its own ISBN. The International ISBN Agency published a "position paper" in February 2010 on ebooks and ISBNs which is available online as a PDF:

E-Books and ISBNs: a position paper and action points from the International ISBN Agency

What do you get when you buy one from Smashwords, do you get one for each format or just one for all of them?

[Worldwalker]

The easy convertibility of formats makes that sound rather insane.

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

I was quite surprised to find out that it won't convert epub files, even though it will convert PDF if you put convert in the subject line. Since epub is a lot easier to convert than PDF, I would guess this is to put people off buying epubs from rival sites?

It's possible, I guess. But Amazon's own command-line MOBI creation tool, Kindlegen, will happily take EPUB files and convert them to MOBI format, so it's not as if Amazon don't provide any means of doing that.

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

What do you get when you buy one from Smashwords, do you get one for each format or just one for all of them?

They only supply an ISBN for the EPUB version of your ebook, since that's the version that goes to Sony and Apple, the two ebookstores they distribute to that require ISBNs.

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

The easy convertibility of formats makes that sound rather insane.

Not really. The point of an ISBN is that it identifies a specific version of a specific book - if a book has an ISBN, that ISBN should be unique to that format, edition and title. So you could, for example, order a book using the ISBN, and know exactly what you'll get. If the ISBN was the same for EPUB, MOBI, PDF, LRF, etc, it would no longer be an exact and unique identifier, which is what an ISBN is intended to be.