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A lot of us with backlist books are now putting them back into circulation through self-published ebooks. I doubt anyone's making a fortune out of this. But it seems to make more sense to have books in circulation legitimately, at low e-prices, than to leave sales to second hand markets and the pirates.

I've only got round to putting up one back list title so far, <a title="Epiphany" href="http://davidhewson.com/standalones/epiphany/"><em>Epiphany</em>,</a> now available for 99p.  I will try to get more online. It is a time-consuming process, though. And all of us involved in this kind of activity do need to issue a kind of caveat to existing readers: these are works we wrote some time ago. Like most people in this position, my writing's changed over the years. Early work is rarely indicative of later work. So expect to be surprised by a change in tone and style. And if you really feel you've wasted your 99p or whatever you can always return it to Amazon for a refund.

<!--more-->What I don't have planned at the moment is any move to extend this process beyond Kindle. One reason for this is, <a title="From Scrivener to Kindle step-by-step" href="http://davidhewson.com/2011/03/from-scrivener-to-kindle-step-by-step/">as I hope I showed in yesterday's post,</a> it is extremely easy to get things online with Amazon's ebook service. Everywhere else is, if you want to charge even a modest sum for your work, much more demanding.

I'm thinking in particular of Apple's iBooks here. I have iBooks on my iPad. It's OK but as a reader I much prefer Kindle. Unlike iBooks it runs on a variety of platforms, from Macs to PCs and Android devices. iBooks is designed for Apple alone. I've no idea how popular it is but as an author publishing medium it poses one significant problem: you have to get yourself an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number" target="_blank">ISBN</a> number for your work.

A what? An International Standard Book Number, a unique code that will identify a single edition of your work in every market where it's sold.

Given that my backlist may one day extend to five or six works that will probably be something I decide to do. But if you're new to publishing, or just want to put up a short story or novella, that ISBN demand is a pain. In the UK the only way to get one is to <a href="http://www.isbn.nielsenbook.co.uk/controller.php?page=123" target="_blank">buy them from Nielsen.</a> Here are the prices...

<img class="size-full wp-image-7690 alignnone" title="Screen shot 2011-03-06 at 10.12.09" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Screen-shot-2011-03-06-at-10.12.09.png" alt="" width="543" height="394" />

If you're in the US you need to go to the <a href="http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/index.asp" target="_blank">ISBN Agency.</a> And note: where you are in the world limits your choice. So you can't buy a US ISBN from the UK (though that UK ISBN you buy will be good worldwide). Not that you'd want to probably because in the US a single ISBN will cost you $125 and ten of them $250.

Amazon doesn't demand you have an ISBN to publish on Kindle, though it will list one if you have it. For iBooks you <em>must</em> have that code. It's not cheap, especially for a single title in the US. The simplest way round this is to use an 'aggregator', a company that has a deal with Apple to supply titles to iBooks and will handle the ISBN side of things. The best known is <a class="zem_slink" title="Smashwords" rel="homepage" href="http://www.smashwords.com/">Smashwords</a>. Unfortunately Smashwords only takes books in Word format, and it's a pain to format them for the Smashwords publication process. The one time I tried (with <em>Epiphany</em>, which has now been removed) the book got repeatedly rejected on the grounds that it was incorrectly formatted even though I followed the Smashwords guidelines to the letter. The company eventually conceded their own guidelines were wrong.

That was a while back and one assumes things are better now. But you still have to deal with Word, not the simple epub export process you can get from Scrivener or Apple Pages. Why? When iBooks actually uses an epub file -- and if you publish direct through the service, with your own ISBN number, an epub file is what you will upload?

I don't know. But then I don't know why iBooks is insisting on ISBN numbers for its own direct publications either, unless it's to frighten off the vast army of self publishers who want to get their work up there for free. ISBN numbers are incredibly useful for physical books. They provide the basis for inventory systems and, in the case of public lending right schemes, are the codes authors use to register their work.

But ebooks are digital. People search for them by author name and book title, not a numeric code. As far as I can see, they serve little purpose for an epublishing system, though perhaps I've just missed something that Apple have spotted and Amazon have missed.

Either way it makes iBooks an unattractive proposition for new authors looking to publish their work, unless they are willing to buy their own ISBN numbers of put up with the added work of dealing with aggregators. The whole point of digital is that it should be quick, easy and efficient. From the point of view of authors, Apple's service doesn't look that way right now.

And you know what? Even the ISBN people don't hide the fact that they're primarily there to service a print-based marketplace. Take a look at this from their 'must-fill' form for new ISBN numbers (which you have to print out and return, by scan or mail, since there's no web form).

<a href="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Screen-shot-2011-03-06-at-10.33.03.png"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-7701" title="Screen shot 2011-03-06 at 10.33.03" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Screen-shot-2011-03-06-at-10.33.03-640x273.png" alt="" width="635" height="270" /></a>
<div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><img class="zemanta-pixie-img" style="border: medium none; float: right;" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=933a6d35-f9e4-4ffe-b7ac-5ed3c3a39e1f" alt="" /></div>
The first person who can tell me correctly where the Verso is on an ebook wins a lollipop.