LITMIR.BIZ

      EDITORIAL LEGALITIES: Getting Your Book’s

       ISBN and CIP and Registering it with Library and Archives Canada

      Library and Archives Canada keeps track of all the books published in the country. It assigns each publisher a list of ten-digit (soon to be 13-digit) International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN). The ISBN of a book is its unique fingerprint, identifying a single publisher and publication, and is embedded in the bar code on the back of the book. No two books in the world are ever registered under the same ISBN (unless someone at the publishing house or filing office has made a terrific mistake!).

      If you simply plan to distribute your print run to family and friends, you won’t need an ISBN. However, if your hopes stretch farther afield and you want to make your home-published book available to the book trade (be it to bookstores, wholesalers or libraries) you’ll absolutely need to obtain an ISBN before you go to press. It’s essential to the distribution, sales and tracking process in the industry.

      The same application process applies whether you’re a huge book publisher or only ever plan to sell a hundred books. The office will need the publisher’s name, even if it’s the same as yours, and a title. Happily, registering your book is free and can be completed in a matter of hours. You can get an application by calling Library and Archives Canada’s Canadian ISBN Agency at (819) 994-6872.

      After you’ve acquired an ISBN, you’ll need to get its close cousin assigned to your book: the Cataloguing in Publication (CIP) data. The CIP data gets included on the copyright page on the back of the title page. While the ISBN only reveals a book’s publisher, title and language of publication (if you can crack the code), the CIP data is far more descriptive. A book’s CIP information is very similar to what you would find in a library catalogue, including subject headings and classification numbers. When you apply for CIP data, the office creates a bibliographic record on a database that is linked to various bibliographic products, used by wholesalers, booksellers and libraries around the world. What this means is that you may get a whole lot of unwanted phone calls if you’re intending to market your book only to family members, so be forewarned.

      You can request the CIP form at the same time as you get your ISBN application, but remember that you’ll need the ISBN first. You can also get the CIP form online at www.collectionscanada/cip/index-e.html. Because the CIP cataloguing process is more involved, allow two weeks for it to be completed. The central CIP office will tell you where to send the CIP form in your area.

      PRODUCTION

      The production department of a publishing company typically deals with budgets and schedules as well as design, layout and printing. Obviously, these are all major areas of the publishing process, and each will be dealt with in depth later in this book.

      Production is one of the main areas that derail home-publishing ventures. Desktop publishing software has made it very easy to prepare book pages very badly. Small local print shops have made it easy to print up bound sets of those badly designed pages very shoddily. One of the main goals of this book is to point out the major book-production pitfalls. Questions to ask yourself about production include: