Question about ISBNs

[longknife]

I have a question about the ISBN: International Book Standard Number. I know it's purchased by a "publisher" to catalog books and book dealers usually won't stock books without one. In addition, a book without an ISBN won't be logged in the Library of Congress.

So, what I cannot find out is - what happens to that number when the publisher removes the book from its publications list?
What can the author of that book do with it? Can they re-write or revise it and have it published under another ISBN?
[No, the author did not copyright the work.]

That work was also published in digital format without the author giving up ANY rights to it.Can the author also self-publish the work on other sources such as Kindle or Nook?

DRM: Digital rights management - and yes, I understand what this is.

Thanks in advance for your advice and help.

[Doug Pardee]

The ISBN refers to a specific edition of a specific title sold by a specific publisher in a specific format. It's just an ordering number, not a universal identification for the content.

I'm in agreement with the many people who think that ISBNs are pretty much irrelevant to e-books. Librarians seem to be the main dissenters.

[longknife]

Thanks for replying!

[Doug Pardee]

The following is FYI. I tried to keep my earlier response short and to-the-point.

Practical considerations

If you want to sell your e-book at the Sony or Apple e-book stores, you must have an ISBN. Why these two e-only booksellers require ISBNs, when Amazon totally ignores ISBNs on e-books, I don't know. But that's the way it is.

If your e-book has an ISBN, its sales can be tracked by BookScan. If it doesn't, it can't. This is probably one of the reasons that e-books from "real publishers" have ISBNs. Be aware: people in the publishing industry usually have access to the BookScan sales numbers. If you're trying to get an agent and they see that your previous self-published e-book sold 3 copies, they're not going to be impressed. If they find it sold 8000 copies, they'll be impressed. So it can be a good thing or a bad thing.

ISBNs are pricey, at least in the US. Buying 10 of them will cost you $250. Which is what you'd pay for 2 if you bought them individually.

Philosophical considerations

An ISBN is supposed to identify a particular edition, so each edition is supposed to have its own ISBN. For e-books, Bowker (who sells ISBNs in the US) believes you should have a separate ISBN for each format: EPUB, Kindle, PDF, etc., but then they make money off of each ISBN so they might be a tad biased.

If you update your e-book to correct a typo, or to change the cover art, that should get a new ISBN. If you've put separate ISBNs on each format, you should put new ISBNs on each format of the corrected e-book. This gets very pricey very quickly.

Having a separate ISBN on each edition also complicates the e-bookstore operation, because if someone wants to redownload in order to get the updated version, the e-bookstore has to be able to recognize that the version specified by the earlier ISBN has been superceded by the new ISBN. Apple's iBookstore didn't do this (I don't know if they've fixed it), with the result that if you bought a defective e-book from them, you'd have to buy the corrected one separately.

But without an ISBN on each edition, it can be a challenge to tell which edition someone has. This is one of the big considerations for librarians: they want to know which edition they've got.

[longknife]

Well, you just gave me a thought, something to consider discussing with my publisher - republishing the totally revised work through them with their marketing outlets.

That something I'm really going to have to mull over. I'm also thinking of going Createspace.

[Nathan Bransford]

Thanks for weighing in Doug, I know very little about ISBNs.