Michael R. Hicks » ISBN http://www.kreelanwarrior.com Tales and Musings Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:00:41 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9 en hourly 1 Kindle Publishing Tip: Do You Need An ISBN For eBooks? http://www.kreelanwarrior.com/2009/03/kindle-publishing-tip-do-you-need-an-isbn-for-ebooks/ http://www.kreelanwarrior.com/2009/03/kindle-publishing-tip-do-you-need-an-isbn-for-ebooks/#comments Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:54:54 +0000 Michael R. Hicks http://www.kreelanwarrior.com/?p=425 This question seems to come up an awful lot: do you need to have an ISBN – International Standard Book Number – for an ebook (on the Amazon Kindle or otherwise)?

The answer, bottom line, is no.

Currently, ISBNs are only required for printed matter books. The purpose of the ISBN, according to ISBN.org, 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.”

At this point, the main use of the ISBN in Kindle publication using Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) is to help Amazon link up the catalog entries for the Kindle and print editions of your book so that the reader reviews posted to one version will also appear in the other, and so on. The same is also true for books you publish through Mobipocket.com that are then distributed to the Kindle store: if you have a print edition of your book on Amazon, make sure to put the print edition ISBN in the ISBN field of the ebook metadata.

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