I Have an ISBN!

Two months ago I produced a little book, about a Saturday spent with Oliver, called Meat Pie at the Landmark Café.

Among other things, the writing, printing and binding gave me a taste of what it takes to manufacture books in small quantities, and I decided to follow through into the next step, and use the project to see what happens next.

First step: get an ISBN.

I’d always conflated product barcodes and ISBNs: they do, after all, look the same.

But barcodes for products require Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs), and getting GTINs requires paying for a Prefix License.

But ISBNs are free, and easy to get via Library and Archives Canada.

So that’s what I did: registered myself up as Reinvented Press (which took about a week once I submitted the application) and then, once I was approved, registered an ISBN for my book using their web system (which was instantaneous).

And so Meat Pie at the Landmark Café is now ISBN 978-1-988893-00-6.

I fed that ISBN into this ISBN bar code generator and, presto, I have a barcode for the back of the book too:

My next step is to print and bind up another copy of the book so that I can fulfill my obligation to provide a Legal Deposit copy.