The Numbers Game

The ISBN number is the 13-digit number (with barcode) on the back of nearly all professionally published books. Thanks to print-on-demand publishing, you can often get away without having one. However, many traditional book sellers such as bookshops won’t sell a book unless it has one, and it does give the impression that your book is a more professional product.

Unfortunately, they are costly, particularly if you’re buying them in small numbers. The agency that sells Australian ISBN numbers is called Thorpe-Bowker, and at time of writing, a single ISBN costs $44 or $88 for a block of 10. Thankfully, Amazon Kindle Publishing and Lulu Publishing will give you a free ISBN if you publish a physical copy of your book with either company. Amazon also has its own numbering system called ASIN that it uses for ebooks. Magazines (like this one, if you’re reading the print edition) use a numbering system called ISSN instead.

The easiest way of creating an ISBN barcode for the back of a book is to use the LibreOffice Barcode extension ( https://extensions.libreoffice.org). You can then export it into other software, if required. The recommended barcode size is 2 x 1.25 -inches.

Once you’ve created a barcode using the appropriate extension in LibreOffice Draw, you can integrate it into the back cover of your book.