This is interesting to learn about. How expensive is it, and do you know if it differs around the world (since there are lots of national ISBN agencies)?
It's $125 list price for a single ISBN, but there are bulk discounts buying direct and purchasing through a large scale supplier can make them as cheap as $10 each. There are deals to be had; Amazon, for example, may give you a free ISBN for your ebook as long as you publish it using KDP, their walled-garden publishing system, but the gotcha is the ISBN is not portable/you're not permitted to use it for other editions outside of the Amazon system.
The other downside to these free (just about always) and discounted (sometimes) ISBNs is that they link the publisher as the service you got the ISBN through, rather than yourself, even if you're doing what would classically be considered a self-publishing job. How big of an issue is that? IANAExpert, but it seems like there are some nooks and crannies of IP law that can be swayed by owning the imprint, but little practical concern for the average person putting an ebook on Amazon e.g. Perhaps someone with more in depth publishing knowledge can color the risks better than I.
Can I just start a non profit “publisher”, buy a block of ISBNs, and hand them out at cost? Costco for ISBNs sort of thing, just enough margin to pay for a few hours a year of my time and a little app to drive the process.
Edit: HN throttling, can’t reply. What if the Internet Archive gets a block and hands them out via Open Library? They seem positioned to argue they’re a bonafide publisher.
"There are unauthorized re-sellers of ISBNs and this activity is a violation of the ISBN standard and of industry practice. A publisher with one of these re-assigned ISBNs will not be correctly identified as the publisher of record in Books In Print or any of the industry databases such as Barnes and Noble or Amazon or those of wholesalers such as Ingram."
>Amazon, for example, may give you a free ISBN for your ebook as long as you publish it using KDP,
That is indeed a bit of a ruse, since an ISBN is supposed to identify an edition or format, but not the sales channel. We give our epub files an ISBN, and all the vendors that sell that file (including Amazon) use the same number. But when you publish with KDP, you are not the publisher. Amazon is, so you have less say in the matter.
$125 is steep, but $10 sounds very doable (for the US).
Good point on the "publisher" linking caveat though. I don't know much that matters in this day and age? Would be useful to learn from some published authors.
For the US, between $125 each (for 1) and $1.50 each (for 1000) from the official source, a company called Bowker. The structure is described in Bowker’s FAQ [0].
In the middle is 10 for $295, which is $30 per. That's a small enough number that you can split the cost with a few friends. But you can also get one from Australia, $88 for 10 or $44 for one.
