The real cost of an ISBN
Ken Franklin
who you apply to for the ISBN. For the US you can visit the US ISBN
Agency site at http://www.isbn.org and use the application form. The
numbers are allocated in blocks with a minimum of 10 in the block and
are allocated to the publisher.
As to price, this is a direct quote from the application form:
"Please note: There is a Publisher Registration Fee. The fee will be
charged to your credit card, in addition to your selected processing
fee, and the total will be reflected on the application itself.
The Publisher Registration Fee is as follows: $24.95 10 ISBNs; $59.95
100 ISBNs; $174.95 1000 ISBNs; $399.95 10,000 ISBNs."
So my reckoning is that a block of ten numbers costs just under $85.00,
so I guess if Lulu charge $150 for one they are making a huge profit.
Having checked their site, I see the charge of $149 actually is for
their global distribution service which includes the ISBN (see
http://www.lulu.com/help/node/view/213)
There is a full list of the national agencies at
http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/international/group_agencies_info.asp
Hope this helps to explain things.
Ken Franklin
thread. Thank you Google Groups!
Default User
> As you may have guessed this was intended as a reply to a previous
> thread. Thank you Google Groups!
Changing the subject in Google makes it create a new thread.
Brian
Ken Franklin
Yes, when I hit reply it helpfully opened a box to type in, so I did.
Then I hit post and it went for my username/password, then took me to a
new post page and I didn't realise we were out of the reply loop.
Paul Drallos
A few years ago, we set my office up with ISBN. We had five guys in the office and we used one ISBN line (which was actually two lines) with a router. This ended up being quite expensive. There was a monthly charge for the line (I forget how much, but somewhere between $25 and $40.) Then there was a connect charge of around 10 cents each time a connection was made. The mail clients checking for mail every ten minutes, 24/7 came to around $400 untinl we disabled the auto mail check. But that's not all. ISBN alone does not get you to the internet. You also need a dial-up service that supports ISBN. That's another $25-$40. All in all, for service that isn't that much faster than dial-up, we were paying $150 to $200 a month. So we quite that and went to DSL and, eventually cable. Much cheaper and a lot faster.
But that was a few years ago. Things may be different now.
Paul Drallos
>
> A few years ago, we set my office up with ISBN.
....
Oooppps. Wrong kind of ISBN.
Sorry.
Michael Vondung
> Oooppps. Wrong kind of ISBN.
ISDN is what you had in your office. ;)
M.
Paul Drallos
Yeah. Double oops.