A friend is looking into print on demand services like lulu.com to print his textbook, but Lulu keeps control of the ISBN number, and he wants to retain that control. Has anyone here had a good experience using such a service from a different company where this wouldn’t be a problem? He getting really tired of printing these things up at Kinko’s, where the price is nearly three times that of Lulu.
You now the last letter in ISBN stands for number right? 
I get corrected for making this mistake every time I mention ISBN (annoying bookshop friend:))
Oh, I’m so sorry…I stand corrected…thanks.
Wrong, wrong wrong! Stop tromping on my pet peeve.
ISBN number is the correct and proper way to phrase it. Only the kind of illiterate pedant who thinks that infinitives can’t be split and sentences can’t end with prepositions says anything this silly. It’s not OPEC nations. It’s OPEC countries. Most acronyms quickly evolve into self-contained entities and absolutely require the finalizing noun to make them understandable.
Now, for the actual question.
Look up short-run presses on Google. There are lots of good ones out there who will take your pdf and turn it into a better-looking book than Lulu will. A textbook might need more specialized attention, but if you friend was thinking of using Lulu in the first place I can’t see any reason why they wouldn’t suit him.
I agree with Exapno. There is nothing wrong with ISBN number or PIN number. It’s a ridiculous overcorrection and there’s nothing grammatically wrong with a minor redundancy (especially since redundancy is an important element of any language).
So no one has any real-life experience with these types of printing houses?
PIN number? ISBN number? ATM machine? CBT training?
(The last one may be a bit obscure. CBT stands for “Computer Based Training,” so if you do CBT training you’re actually doing Computer Based Training training.)
I AM NOT AN ILLITERATE PEDANT. At any rate I’m not illiterate.
Stop it, people. Think about what you’re saying. Enter your PIN, please. Stop at the ATM. Stay away from the Department of Redundancy Department.
NOW, to answer the question. I work for a small publisher. We have a book of ISBNs (hah; I almost said ISBN numbers) that we got from Bowker, and each publisher has its own number. We have a block of several thousand numbers, in sequence.
It’s very likely that lulu is registered as the publisher and that’s why it keeps control of the ISBN. It isn’t really control, though–it’s not like copyright, it’s just an identifying number that’s very helpful (in fact, crucial) if you want your book ordered by bookstores. There’s really no harm in lulu keeping it. They have a block of probably several thousand numbers and they will just slot your book into the next available number under their aegis. An ISBN isn’t a control kind of thing.
A publisher, small or large, can get as many numbers as it requests, but someone publishing only one book, or even self-publishing a few of them, would probably do better to go through lulu or some other company that has a publisher’s number. (I think it goes like this: 1-2222-333-3 where 1 is the country, 2 is the publisher’s number, and 3 is the unique identifying number, sometimes ending with X. This is for the 10-digit number. At some point we started using 13-digit numbers but the publisher’s identifier is the same.)
Yes, I do.
I went through the procedure I described. I designed the book and the cover (with the aid of an artist) and sent them off as a pdf. The company printed them. I checked the proofs and made corrections electronically. The finished book gets lots of compliments for how good it looks. Cost: $3.50 per copy plus shipping. That’s obviously dependent on size, paper and cover stock choices, and number printed, but the price was highly competitive. They were quick to respond and worked with me at all times. I have my own block of ISBNs and my own publishing company now.
The name of the firm is Publishers Graphics. I have no other connection with them and I want to emphasize that I have no idea if they’re the right firm for you. I sent out price requests to a number of firms before I chose them and I highly recommend that you do the same.
As for ISBN number: I use the term illiterate pedant to describe people who know everything about the English language except how it actually works in practice. ISBN number is correct. So is PIN number and ATM machine. Have you ever seen UPC without the added Code?
How do we know this is correct? Good writers use the terms. There is no other rule that supersedes this.
I’m a good writer. These terms drive me crazy. Particularly when I catch myself using them.
At my weekend retail job I tell people about 20 times a day to “Enter your PIN.” They never once have asked, “My PIN what?”
This is irrefutable evidence that this usage is so logical, natural, and useful that good writers automatically adopt it.
Why in the world do you think you need to fight that? Who made up this “rule”? What is their authority? What conceivable reason can they give for banning something that clarifies the language? Why listen to “them” when they clearly have their heads up their asses?
Eh, I got into it when editing a legal document and two attorneys were fighting about whether we should say “the rate was tied to the LIBOR” or “the rate was tied to the LIBOR rate.” If you know that LIBOR stands for “London InterBank Offered Rate”–which, quite understandably, hardly anybody does-- then you look at a sentence like “…rate is tied to the LIBOR rate” and there are an awful lot of “rates” in there. So one attorney and I sided with LIBOR only, and the other wanted “LIBOR rate,” and since attorneys love to be redundant, she won.
If I know what the acronym means I kind of hear the whole thing–I sort of hear the whole words behind the initials, somehow*–so it sounds redundant to me, and it bothers me.
And before you say it, yes, the entire world calls it the “LIBOR rate.”
*And in various colors, too, for instance PIN is pink and tan. ATM is black and red, with a thin diagonal green stripe. Okay, I’m weird.
Does anyone know how you get a book published that way listed on Amazon? I am coauthor of a book reprinted by a small publisher who can’t or won’t get the book listed. People look for the book (it is designed as a textbook), Amazon tells them it is out of print and they give up (and sometimes write to me, although the republication details are on my web site (and my coauthor’s too).
It always used to be the case that the structure of ISBNs was somewhat variable - number ranges were allocated with long publisher prefixes (so more of them) and shorter title identifier portions (so less of them) - catering for small publishers of few titles.
Other number ranges were set up with shorter publisher prefixes and longer title identifiers - there could not be so many of these, but since they included the scope for very large lists of titles, they only went to the big publishers.
(Obviously it wasn’t possible to allocate a range that had a short publisher prefix that was the same as the starting digits of one of the long prefixes).
Not sure if they still stick to that, as I’m not in publishing any more - but it used to work that way.
I don’t know. We got ours in a batch of 10,000 in the early '90s and publish about 120 titles a year, so we have plenty left. Apparently we don’t have to switch to the 13-digit numbers until we run out. In the 10-digit numbers the last one, after the dash, was some sort of control number. So the last digits of consecutive ISBNs would end up, for instance, “00707-3” and “00708-1” or “420-1” and “421-X.”
The big publishers have a couple of extra digits to designate different imprints, I think. Or even totally different publisher numbers for different imprints–this might be the result of mergers, though.
The last digit is a calculated check digit.
The 13 digit ISBNs are just ‘bookland’ EANs - your existing 10-digit ISBNs can be converted to valid ISBN-13s by dropping the check digit, prefixing with ‘978’ and recalculating the check digit using the EAN formula. (there are online tools to do this too).
(There is also a range of ISBN-13s that begins ‘979’, for which no valid ISBN-10 counterparts exist, or can be back-worked).
You probably ought to be calculating the ISBN-13s and including it for any books you print or reprint from now on - as it is fast becoming mandatory in some parts of the book trade.
For reasons unbeknown to me, in the US you have to purchase ISBNs, and from a private company at that. AFAIK they are free most everywhere else.
The reason Lulu, and other such companies “keep” the ISBN is because in the US you have to buy the ISBNs in batches of 10 or more. Since a one-time-author is not going to spend hundreds of dollars in unused ISBNs they rather “sub-contract” (for lack of a better term) an ISBN from Lulu.
Owning a book ISBN does not mean that you own the copyright. They are independent from each other. I believe Lulu does not retain the rights to your material, you are free to publish there or anywhere else, provided you don’t use their ISBN. Books are frequently revised and re-published, they need a new ISBN every time it happens, so this is not rare.
Your friend can buy her own ISBNs if she/he wishes.
In my country anyone can own an ISBN. You get as many as you wish, and they are free. It is the case in most countries (if not all). I am a small publisher (but cannot publish works that I don’t own the copyright to, per Dominican rule), but I understand the US system fairly well. If you wish you can PM me and I can try to help you.
What he said.
This is great information. I’ll pass it along to my friend and see if there are any other questions.