[FM Discuss] ISBN Numbers Summary.

[David Farning]

I spent a couple of hours researching of ISBNs and how they apply to FM and SL.

An ISBN is the International Standard Book Number necessary for each
book marketed to the book trade (bookstores and libraries). Bookstores
will not order a book without an ISBN... mostly because they can't.
Without an ISBN, there's no number for them to look up.

This relates to Sugar Labs because Floss Manuals sells Sugar manuals
on Amazon.  How cool is that?  While nobody is quiting their day jobs
yet....  The synergy between FM and SL had great potential.

The work flow currently is:
1.  FM/SL booksprint to create the content
2.  FM publishes the content.  Current they use http://www.lulu.com/
3.  FM makes the content more widely available via resellers such as Amazon.

The ISBN is the link between steps 2 and 3.  For the geeks in the
room, the ISBN represents a unique identifier for the book.

Getting an ISBN

>From Lulu - The most straight forward to get an ISBN is to buy one
directly from lulu.  The Cost is about $150/ISBN.  The problem is that
Lulu owns the ISBN in the writers name.  You can't transfer the ISBN
to another publisher.

>From ISBN Broker - The ISBN Agency has authorize about 170 different
organizations to sell 'blocks' of ISBNs to publishers in different
geographicial regions.

In New Zealand the national library gives away blocks of ISBNs in
exchange for a donation of 2 copies of each book to the national
library.  Cost is the cost of printing and sending two books to New
Zealand.

In England the situation is similar.  Cost 6 is six books for various
English libraries.

In the US http://www.bowker.com/ has exclusive rights to sell blocks of ISBNS.
Cost is about.
10 ISBNs  	$245.00
100 ISBNs  	$930.00
1,000 ISBNs 	$1,570.00

Recomendation:

Purchase a block of ten ISBNs from bowker in the name of Floss
manuals.  This allows us to identify FM as the publisher not lulu.

Assign these ISBNs to new books as the come 'off the presses' as FM.

After the first ten ISBNs are assigned, reassess the situation.

If, this sounds reasonable, I'll buy the first block of ten in FM's
name to get the ball rolling.

david