ISBN FAQs

The International Standard Book Number is a unique 13-digit identifier attached to every book around the world. Think of it as your book’s social security number.

An ISBN is a globally recognized identifier for your book, providing publishers around the world with all the essential information they need to know about it. Your book’s ISBN stores all your book’s specifics, such as its format, edition and publisher, which helps retailers catalog it. Whether you want to sell your book or distribute it through your local library, you will need to obtain an ISBN for it.

Obtaining an ISBN improves the chances of your book being found and purchased. It also helps you collect and analyze your book sale data, providing you with useful insights for marketing. As a bonus, your ISBN also automatically enters your book into the Books in Print database, a world-renown platform used by publishers and retailers worldwide, increasing your chances of being discovered in the global literary community.

If you decide to make your book available in different formats, such as printed softcover, hardcover, eBook, or audiobook, you will need a different ISBN for each format. To help our community of Indie authors make their book accessible to different types of readers, we offer ISBNs in bundles of 10.

Not at all. You can purchase your ISBNs in advance and register them as you publish each new edition of your book. ISBNs don’t have an expiration date!

We purchase our ISBNs directly from Bowser, which ensures that your book will be identified accurately and entered to the global database under Escolástica Press.

It depends on the format you plan on selling. Amazon uses their own identifier, called ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). However, this only applies to Kindle eBooks sold on Amazon. If you wish to sell a print copy, you will still require an ISBN to list it.