The ISBN is a unique identifier, a number applied to every published book in the world. It is used by the book trade for managing and reporting sales, inventory control and ordering. There is an optional bar code for the price of your book.

If you wish to sell your book through book wholesalers and book stores, you will need an ISBN number for your book. The book’s ISBN number must be registered to you as publisher. Apply for ISBN numbers and price bar codes at: www.isbn.org.

Aachanon Publishing cannot purchase ISBNs and re-assign a code to you. The reason is that once a publisher has been assigned an ISBN number and price code it can only assign ISBNs to publications it holds publishing rights to. A publisher cannot resell, reassign, transfer, or split it's list of ISBNs among other publishers. If a second publisher subsequently obtains an ISBN from the assigned publisher's block of ISBNs, any search of industry data bases for that reassigned ISBN will identify the original owner of the prefix as the publisher rather than the second publisher.

You may encounter offers other than RR Bowker to purchase single ISBNs at special offer prices; you should be wary of purchasing from these sources. A publisher with such re-assigned ISBNs will not be correctly identified in any of the industry data bases including those of retailers such as Barnes and Noble, Amazon or those of wholesalers such as Ingram.

ISBNs are sold singly by RR Bowker and in blocks of 10, 100, and 1,000 over the Internet. Each code is designated to the book's title, not the number of books you sell. Thus you must write ten different titled books to use up the ten ISBNs. If you have one book written now, you can use one of the numbers and have nine left to use for the books you may write in the future. The current cost for this service is $125 (one code), $269.95 (10 codes) and a bar price code is $25 per unit.

Copyright

You need an ISBN number to register a copyright for your book with the U.S. Copyright Office. The copyright costs $33.

If you are not planning to sell your book in bookstores, the simplest way of copyrighting your work is to mail yourself a copy of your finished manuscript. Do not open the returned envelope containing the manuscript, but store it in a safe place. In the event of a dispute over your copyright, the date stamp on the envelope will be proof that the copyright of your work is valid and that the work is your own.

Another important protection is the inclusion within the book, on the reverse side of the title page, of a copyright assertion statement, for example:

© copyright 2006 by John Doe.

Usually this statement appears along with a statement similar to the following:

“All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the author. Contact the author at . . .”