Here I am, with my taxes done just in time, and diligently avoiding step 36 of the 43-step process (all numbers imaginary) of doing royalty statements for FoxAcre Press (and yes, I’m running late on that job. But nearly done.)
Note: The following is somewhat (maybe even largely) redundant to what I wrote The Romance of ISBN and Barcodes and Such but that static page has a bit more emphasis on the scams based on confusing the apple of copyright with the oranges of ISBN and barcode.
I have on a number of occasions encountered people who had done just enough research on various points of publishing to get it all wrong. (A related species are those who encounter a subject that comes up in conversation, think about it for 15 seconds and then offer their Brilliant Insights to someone who has done it for years.)
So let me unsnarl the muddled concepts of barcode, ISBN, and copyright, working from back to front. And here’s the standard disclaimer that I’m not a lawyer, and am not giving legal advice, and laws differ from country to country and from one day to the next and and you should look things up for yourself. Plus I am skipping over a lot of related details about, for example, what information is baked into an ISBN or how to get one. Anyway:
I strongly suspect that the confusion about what is required and what is optional about these items is fostered deliberately by Vanity Presses and their ilk. The more they tell you that you must have These Things and it is Very Hard to get them, but we can Do It For You for An Additional Fee, the more money they make. But that’s another essay.
Copyright is only one of three that has any meaningful legal significance. Under current U.S. law, whatever you write — a book, a short story, a web journal post, whatever — is copyrighted and your intellectual property the moment you write it. That’s oversimplifying a tad, but essentially accurate. You don’t need to do a damn thing in order to secure the copyright. However, you can register your copyright ( a process which merely creates a record of the copyright, and does not create the copyright). You do this through the U.S. Copyright Office, which is part of the Library of Congress. You can also get a LCNN/CiP entry, which is not required and basically helps with library sales. I quote from an essay on the subject that I’ll get back to some day:
… there is no need to get your copyright registered, or to get a LCCN/CiP entry. Under present U.S. law, any book written in the U.S. is automatically under copyright protection and is the intellectual property of the person who wrote it. There is no legal requirement of any kind for you to register a copyright. It costs between $35 and $55 to register the average copyright. Basically, you need to fill out some forms and send the copyright office a copy of the book. In many cases, you can upload a computer text file instead of mailing in a physical printed copy. See http://copyright.gov/eco/eco-tutorial-standard.pdf and http://copyright.gov/circs/circ04.pdf and http://copyright.gov/help/faq/index.html – or just wander around copyright.gov.
The Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) is mainly meant to facilitate matters for libraries ordering books. Getting one might or might not be worthwhile. Getting one for you book means logging on to a website, and then entering some information, and then waiting to receive a response—but it’s free. See https://www.loc.gov/publish/pcn/
The copyright applies to the intellectual property of your work. It says that you control any and all use of your work in whatever form — all printed versions, audio books, public performances, etc. If you sign a contract with a publisher who wants to sell copies of your work, that contract amounts to the terms under which you are renting (or, really don’t do this, selling) the rights to your work. The usual term for this is a “Grant of Rights.” Sometimes people talk about licensing a work, but it’s the same thing. You grant the publisher the right to publish the book for X years, or until only Z copies sell per year, or until whatever conditions that pertain in the contract are met. Then the rights revert to you, and you can grant the rights elsewhere. In short, the copyright continues to be your property, but you can grant someone else the right to use that property.
You can also, in theory, grant different sets of rights: to publish in a magazine, as a stand-alone book, to publish in another country, or another language. A publisher will try to claim as broad a range of rights as possible for as long as possible for the lowest possible price. The writer will want to grant a narrower range of right for a briefer time for a higher price. (I am resisting the temptation to discuss the vital importance of a good reversion clause in any contract, but just barely. Another essay topic for another day.)
In that publishing contract, you will be expected to assert or affirm or whatever that you own the rights you are granting. If it turns out you don’t own or have legal use of the copyright, you are in very big trouble. This is why you must own the copyright, and why registering it, thus creating a paper trail, is arguably a good idea.
A copyright is intellectual property. Like any other form of property, it can be bought and sold, or rented out. You could sell the copyright to your work outright. There are very good reasons this is a very rare thing to do. Better to license the rights and have the means of reverting the rights.
None of this has a damned thing to do with ISBNs. An ISBN is merely a book industry standard for a SKUID. And that’s a useless bit of information unless you know that a SKUID is a Stock Keeping Unit IDentifier. It is simply a number assigned to a given product so it can be uniquely identifiable and distinguished from all other products. If Kelloggs makes six different size packages of corn flakes, the corn flakes inside will be identical –but the boxes will be different sizes. The 12-ounce packet, the 24-ounce package, and the 50-pound case will have different SKUIDs. Looking at it a different way, the 24-ounce boxes of Rice Krispies, Raisin Bran, and Corn Flakes need to be distinguished from each other: they are all the same weight, but have different contents. Again, each has its own SKUID.
An ISBN is an International Standard Book Number. Each edition of each book is supposed to have its own unique ISBN, so as to distinguish each each edition of each title from all other editions of that book and from all editions of all other books. If you have a trade paperback, a hardcover, a small mass-market paperback, an ebook edition, and a Large Print edition of the same book, all are covered by the same copyright, but each separate edition has its own ISBN, because each is different from the others in some way. Different price, different binding, different size. If you have a U.S. edition and a Canadian edition and a U.K. edition and a German edition, each of those should have its own ISBN. (However, you can just go ahead and sell the same edition everywhere. Broadly speaking, there are no legal issues involved in, for example, selling a book with a U.K. ISBN in the U.S.)
If you change the price, or correct a typo or two, or make a minor update or correction, there is no need to go to the hassle of getting a new ISBN. (You can even change the cover art and retain the same ISBN.) If, however, you make substantial changes to the book, then a new ISBN is in order.
There is no legal requirement of any kind in the United States, or, to my knowledge, in any halfway decent country, for a book to have an ISBN. You can print and sell as many copies as you want without your book having an ISBN. The catch is that, generally speaking, no bookseller will buy from you, because the ISBN is the basis for how they manage inventory and track sales. Just as you can’t receive phone calls if you don’t have a phone number, your book can’t get orders if it doesn’t have an ISBN. So: an ISBN is not a legal requirement, but it is tantamount to being a business requirement.
(I shouldn’t say no bookseller will buy if you don’t have an ISBN. You might be able to talk the manager of your local bookstore to put a few copies on the check-out counter or something. You might be able to sell a box of books to someone who can sell them at, say, a convention. But if you’re hoping for people to order books through the normal bookselling channels, you’ll want an ISBN.)
The barcode on a back of a book is merely the ISBN and maybe the price written in a form that is easy for a scanner to understand. See this link for more on all this. Again, there is no legal requirement of any kind to use a barcode — but booksellers rely on them heavily, and no one is going to want to deal with buying or selling a book that does not have one.
To sum up: the only thing you have to have is a copyright, and that is yours automatically with absolutely no effort aside from writing the damned book. You can register your copyright if you wish. Doing so will make it easier to document the ownership of your copyright in the event that someone tries to steal your book’s text, but so far as I understand, as a matter of law, it has no bearing. It helps prove the book is yours, but it does not create or enhance your ownership of the book’s intellectual property. There is no legal requirement for an ISBN, but is pretty much a business necessity. A barcode is merely the ISBN and perhaps the price written in a form that scanners and computers can handle easily. Again there is no legal requirement for a barcode, but the bookselling business really wants each book to have one.
Enough for now!
