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Originally Posted by SigilBear
Well now, before posting I visited another page on Apple's site that said just the opposite - an ISBN is required.
But the question is really mute, because even if an ISBN is merely RECOMMENDED, I'm going to get one. So my original question still stands: If I get an ISBN for a book I'm selling via iBooks, can I slap the same ISBN on the Kindle version of the same book.
In other news, it appears that there may be some ebook sellers that DO require ISBN's. |
People seem to struggle so much with the ISBN question that we are in the middle of creating an interactive answer-bot, for the FAQ on my site, to help people with it.
Firstly, Lulu isn't really a "seller of eBooks." Like Smashwords, BookBaby, InscribeDigital, Ingram, etc., they are simply a distributor. In this day and age, for digital books, that really amounts to "publisher." And thus, you understand why they require an ISBN (theirs, mind you)--because they distribute (publish) books to myriad retailers, and their fees are paid on ISBNs. (As are their uploads via FTP, in which books are identified as 123456789.isbn, and so forth.)
Bowker has recently taken to selling a product that they specifically call an "eBook ISBN." not to be confused with the "old" eBook ISBN, or the ePUB ISBN, etc. I think that they took this step simply because none of the retailers (that actually have any volume worth thinking about) require them. iBooks absolutely doesn't require ISBNs, not unless that's changed in the last few weeks. They used to--but they haven't in years. Nor does B&N, Amazon, and last time I looked, KoboBooks, but I'm not positive about KoboBooks any longer.
And, of course, it's utterly unneeded. What's the entire purpose of an ISBN? It's simply this: Ordering, fulfillment, and payment. That's the only reason that they exist. The entity that owns the ISBN, owns the rights (to that edition), and gets paid for it. Therefore, for eBooks, there's no point. There's no ordering, away from the retailer; there's no fulfillment, in the sense that there is with physical books, and no payment collected by the distributor that is then transmitted to the publisher.
In an eBook environment, of course, none of that is needed. There's no ordering from a distribution warehouse; the bookstore doesn't pay the distributor, who in turn pays the publisher, etc. It's all the same. The publisher uploads it directly to the retailer, and that's all she wrote.
Good luck.
Hitch