[batterylow]

Things like this are why I purchased some ISBNs and self-publish/distribute.

The books (e.g.:Data Analysis with Rust Notebooks[1] and Practical Evolutionary Algorithms[2]) are doing well, and whilst I'm likely "leaving money on the table", I'm happy with how it's going.

[1] https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/data-analysis-with-rust-...

[2] https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/practical-evolutionary-a...

[bschne]

I'm not familiar but curious: If you entirely self-publish, is there a benefit to having an ISBN number over... Just publishing w/o one? Or is there a legal requirement to do so?

[batterylow]

It was often brought up in conversations with universities and their libraries - having them made things more convenient. The books were selling for a year or so without ISBNs, no problems either way!

[vidarh]

ISBN's provide a way for people - including bookstores and libraries to index your book data. Which means if you use Ingram Spark, or Amazon's extended distribution, or any other major distributor, your book will pop up on huge amounts of other bookstores inventory systems pretty much automatically.

It won't mean a lot for sales unless you also encourage places (stores, libraries) to stock them, but it does have a small effect (caveat: self-published authors are seen as less than dirt by a lot of bookstores, as a subset of self-published authors takes the "encourage places" as "relentlessly badger places" to try to get them to stock unsellable books)

I've had a handful of sales that way, and financially it's been irrelevant, but it is a little boost to see my books pop up more places.