Illegal Astronauts Book 1 Update #2
Navigating the USA ISBN number monopoly and software assembled eBooks.
What's Up?
This week I’ve been focusing on securing the ISBNs for Illegal Astronauts Book 1 and digging into the software I’m creating to convert my manuscript format into an EPUB file for universal publishing.
ISBN Numbers Are Expensive
If you've had to buy textbooks or are an avid reader, you probably know what an ISBN number is. For those that don't, it's a unique code like a UUID that represents a given book or similar published work. Each edition of a book including any soft cover, hard cover, or eBook version is supposed to have its own ISBN number which makes finding those copies easy. They're a critical component of any real book.
There's a single National ISBN agency in the United States. This is, in effect, a monopoly.
The thing is, ISBN numbers are issued on an international level through the use of what's referred to as "National ISBN Agencies." These agencies are selected by the International ISBN Agency and are granted what amounts to complete freedom over how they wish to operate the national region they represent. If that's not striking any alarm bells for you, also consider that, typically, these agencies are private corporations with only 1 selected per national region. Effectively, each and every one is a monopoly for their nation.
While in some countries, like Canada, the national government handles ISBNs and gives them out for free, in the United States the elected agency is: "R.R. Bowker, LLC". A private limited liability company. And all it takes is one look at their website to see they are truly doing the least.
R.R. Bowker, LLC charges $125 for a single ISBN number and, as they say on their website, "most books average two to three ISBNs to accommodate all published formats."
In fact, if you dig in you'll notice a single ISBN number costs $125 before taxes. This is, of course, to inspire any prospective buyer to opt for the 10 Pack which sits at a cool $295 before taxes. While, yes, this does reduce the cost per ISBN down to $29.50 each, you must consider that, as they say on their website, "most books average two to three ISBNs to accommodate all published formats."
But, what really strikes me as corrupt is their offerings for "10 ISBNs, 5 Barcodes, and 1 QRPlus Code" for $395 before taxes. Because what they're really offering here is that you give them an extra $100 so they can generate a standard, everyday, barcode using your ISBN, but only for 5 of the 10 ISBNs you've purchased. For those not technologically inclined, the process for producing your own barcode is as simple as pasting your ISBN number into a free and numerous online bar code generator.
Bowker also offers an expensive copyright "service" bundled with some ISBN packages that doesn't even cover the copyright fee, paid by the purchaser, directly to the US Copyright Office. But, we're not even going to get into that.
Effectively, the US's only ISBN broker maintains complete monopoly over the entire nation.
Suffice to say, the USA is in a sorry state when it comes to ISBN numbers. It's even worse than the IP Address broker industry (the address system by which the entire public internet operates) as in that field at least there are competitors.
So, if you've ever wondered why the paid memberships here are so important, this cost is one of the reasons why. As like many of the common things in the modern world, there is an extensive and often shady substructure holding those elements aloft. And such realities were one of the original sources of inspiration for the universe of Illegal Astronauts.
Building a Better eBook
On a different topic entirely: for those of you have read some of my past update posts, you'll know that I write my written work in the Markdown format. I do this because it minimizes the amount of formatting I need to do while writing, which removes distractions, and because it's almost infinitely flexible in terms of how it can be deployed. From a single .md file I can deploy to web, PDF, .docx, eBook formats, and more in a repeatable fashion with little effort.