Short answer: No.
Long answer: There isn’t one clear answer to suit everyone, because it all depends on your exact circumstances. Please bear with me, because this is going take a while…
What is an ISBN?
ISBN stands for: International Standard Book Number. It’s a 13 digit (formerly 10 digit) unique number that identifies a particular edition of a specific book. They apply to ebooks, audiobooks, print books and other publications. And each one of them is logged in a global database containing all pertinent details of said publication. You’ll find this number on most print books on the back, alongside a barcode representing the same number. Some books also have the ISBN listed on the copyright page inside.
The ISBN helps bookshops, libraries and online marketplaces list and distribute copies of a specific book and distinguish between different editions or different books that happen to have the same title. So, if a book is available in ebook, paperback, hard back, large print and audio format, each one of those versions is distinct and should be uniquely identifiable.
Right, so I need one for each format I want to publish my book in, yes?
Kind of, but that doesn’t mean you need to spend money on them. Many publishing services give you the option of using a free ISBN supplied by them. And on some platforms, like Amazon and Google Play, ebooks don’t need them at all.
What are your goals?
When you set out to publish your first (or fifth, or fiftieth) book, you might have some goals in mind for it. Maybe you’re looking to immortalise your life story and hand out copies of your soon-to-be-published book to friends and family as your legacy. On the other side of the spectrum, maybe you’re hoping to become a bestselling author in your chosen genre.
The Hobbyist Author does not need to buy ISBNs. If you’re simply looking to publish a book for yourself, and maybe your family to read, and you’re not hoping for any meaningful commercial success, then you do not need to spend any money on an ISBN. Publishing services such as Amazon KDP, Draft2Digital and more either do not require an ISBN at all (for ebooks), and for print books, they tend to offer offer you one you can use for free.
The Professional Author might not need to buy ISBNs either. It all depends on what path they’re taking with their books.
There are many ways up the mountain for the aspiring bestselling author. You might focus on digital sales (ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks/hardbacks sold almost exclusively through online retailers), in which case there is little benefit to owning your own ISBNs. Simply: most readers will never notice or care who owns the ISBN attached to your book.
However, if your strategy involves getting your book stocked by physical bookstores, then you do.
Let me explain.
One of the bits of information attached to a book’s ISBN is the publisher of record. That means that whoever owns the ISBN will be listed in the book’s metadata as the publisher. If you buy your own ISBNs, then that’s you. If you’ve got a free ISBN from Amazon KDP, then that’s going to be Amazon, etc.
For most authors, that’s not a problem. As I mentioned, most readers don’t care about this. But bookstores very much do! Independent bookstores tend to view Amazon as their competition, and with good reason. So if you’re trying to convince your local store to stock your books, they’re going to turn you down very quickly once they see that the book is being published by Amazon. In this case, and this case alone, it’s going to be vital for you to purchase your own ISBNs.
Another potential factor is kind of ego related. If you yourself feel bad that your book might show up as being published by Amazon, then you might want to stay away from their free ISBNs and buy your own. The same applies for anyone who isn’t just trying to publish a couple of books, but launch their own small publishing company in the long term. In this case you’re going to want all your books to correctly show your publishing company name in the metadata to look professional.
The further potential downside to using free ISBNs is that you cannot transfer the ISBN across from one retailer to another. If you got one from Amazon, you’ll need to use it only on Amazon. And if you then decide to publish the same print book on B&N, you’ll need to use a different ISBN there (another free one?). And if you later decide to do a limited print run with a printer, you’ll need to buy your own ISBN as well. This can result in you having a few different ISBNs out there all leading back to the exact same book.
But that’s for print books. For ebooks, there is anecdotal information out there stating that having one ISBN for your ebook and one ISBN for your paperback is helpful when making an attempt to get onto a bestseller list (USA Today or NY Times), because it supposedly helps in tallying your sales across platforms. But there is equally strong anecdotal information out there from people who never purchased an ISBN and hit those lists anyway.
Where will you publish?
If you’re planning to start out selling exclusively on Amazon, you can safely skip paid ISBNs and spend your money on something else. Ebooks on Amazon don’t need an ISBN. Sure, there’s a space to input one if you have it, but if you skip that, Amazon will use their own internal identifier (ASIN) to tell your ebook apart from others on the website. And Amazon and others will let you publish your print books for free, using a free ISBN.
There is one notable exception, though: Ingram Spark.
If you’re planning to publish your print book(s) via Ingram Spark (please don’t publish an ebook using Ingram Spark, I’ll explain why in a future blog post!), you might have seen that they charge a set-up fee for every book you upload. You might have also heard that they run regular promotions giving out coupons to get that set-up fee waived. Some professional memberships (Alliance of Independent Authors, to name one) also give out coupons you can use to avoid the set-up fee. But the catch with these discounts is that you can only use them with your own ISBN. If you ask for a free ISBN from Ingram Spark, they’ll charge you the full set-up fee; currently $50 per book.
What is your budget?
Many self-publishers start out with budget restrictions. And ISBNs are mostly quite expensive to buy, especially in small numbers. So, if you’re on a very limited budget, you’re usually better off just spending your money on other parts of the publishing process (like editing, or getting a good book cover), rather than spending hundreds of dollars on ISBNs.
For an author who is only planning to publish a single book, it can even be cheaper to simply pay the Ingram Spark set up fee and take a free ISBN from them, rather than buy a pack of ISBNs and get the set-up for free. But only if you’re quite sure you’ll not publish any future books with them! That $50 set-up fee starts adding up quickly when you have multiple books written.
If however you’re further along in your publishing journey with multiple books out or in production, and have the money to spend, it can make sense to buy a pack of 100 or even 1000 ISBNs which brings the cost per ISBN down to much more manageable levels. And even then, it makes sense for most authors to only use paid ISBNs for print books and leave the ebooks as they are.
What if I change my mind later?
If you’ve gone ahead and published with a free ISBN or without an ISBN at all, and you think you’ve made a mistake, you’re free to change your mind at any time. That’s the beauty of self-publishing; its flexibility!
But, just how you go about applying your new ISBNs to your books will depend on the retailer.
Amazon allows you to go into your ebook listing and retroactively input an ISBN. Most other services do not, in which case you have to unpublish the existing book and publish a brand new edition of it with the new ISBN.
Print books also cannot be changed like this; they need to be unpublished and republished anew as well.
The potential repercussions you may face for this is a loss of reviews on some retailers. Since Amazon lets you change an ebook’s ISBN without any issue, your reviews aren’t affected here. Also, Amazon typically links your paperback and ebook edition onto one product listing page (linking the reviews as well), so even if you take down your paperback and republish it with a fresh ISBN, as long as it gets successfully linked to the original Kindle edition, the reviews will stay intact. Furthermore, if for whatever reason the reviews did not carry over from one version to another, you can contact KDP Support and ask them nicely to transfer the reviews from the old book to the new book. The only thing you need for this is the ASIN/ISBN of the original edition and the ASIN/ISBN of the new edition.
But not every retailer is this helpful when it comes to transferring reviews across to new editions, even if the contents of a book remain exactly the same. I believe this is because maybe not every retailer has the technical capabilities to do so.
So, whether or not it’s worth it for you to republish an existing book with a different ISBN later (and risk losing its reviews), is a choice only you can make.
In conclusion…
As a self-published author, you mostly do not need to buy your own ISBNs, unless:
- You wish to sell print books to bookstores (a bookstore will almost certainly never order a book which lists “Amazon” as the publisher of record).
- You personally don’t like having Amazon listed as the publisher of your book.
- You’re planning to set up a small publishing company and are trying to project a professional image.
- You’re planning to publish more than one print book on Ingram Spark and want to make use of a coupon to avoid the $50 set-up fee they charge.