Spending time on www.isbn.org is something I recommend to all our authors. www.isbn.org is ran by RR Bowker, the only agency I recommend authors to take care of getting ISBNs, bar codes, copyrights and other registrations. If you’re serious about publishing, spend as much time as you need to on this site. And don’t buy an ISBN from anyone else!

Okay, so what exactly is an ISBN? The acronym ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a 10-digit number that uniquely identifies books and book-like products published internationally. The ISBN identifies the owner of a published work.

The purpose of the ISBN is to establish and identify one title or edition of a title from one specific publisher and is unique to that edition, allowing for more efficient marketing of products by booksellers, libraries, universities, wholesalers and distributors.

There are over 160 ISBN Agencies worldwide, and each ISBN Agency is appointed as the exclusive agent responsible for assigning ISBNs to publishers residing in their country or geographic territory. The United States ISBN Agency is the only source authorized to assign ISBNs to publishers in the United States, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and Puerto Rico and its database establishes the publisher of record associated with each prefix.

Once an ISBN publisher prefix and associated block of numbers has been assigned to a publisher by the ISBN Agency, the publisher can assign ISBNs to publications it holds publishing rights to. However, after the ISBN Agency assigns ISBNs to a publisher, that publisher cannot resell, re-assign, transfer, or split its list of ISBNs among other publishers. These guidelines have long been established to ensure the veracity, accuracy and continued utility of the international ISBN standard.

If you are a new publisher, you should apply for your own ISBN publisher prefix and plan to identify and circulate your books properly in the industry supply chain. You may encounter offers from other sources to purchase single ISBNs at special offer prices; you should be wary of purchasing from these sources. 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. If you have questions, contact the US ISBN Agency for further advice.

Granted, dealing with ISBNs and copyrights and crossing all your t’s and dotting all your i’s is not the most sexiest part of being a published writer, but as in most endeavors, the devil’s in the details. Fortunately, the internet is making all the tedious tasks of publishing much more simple.

You can actually download a 39 page ISBN manual by going to www.isbn.org. Something new to RR Bowker is that you can now order just one ISBN. In the past, you were required to order in blocks of 10.