Registration of your ISBN happens at the beginning of your publishing process and will be displayed on the copyright/imprint page inside your book and will be used to generate the barcode on the back cover of your book.

As part of your ISBN process, we also submit your book’s details to the National Library of Australia’s online cataloguing records, which is available via the Libraries Australia and Trove websites. Once your book is published, we submit your legal deposit through the NLA’s online deposit system which ensures a comprehensive collection of published Australian materials are preserved for the community and future generations.

An ISBN is used commercially in distribution channels to identify your book. Think of the barcodes on the back of all the products in the supermarket. When you scan the item, the correct product and price is entered into the register. Your ISBN works the same way when your book is sold commercially.

If you intend to sell your book to bookstores, retailers, libraries, or wholesale distributors, then you will need an ISBN.

No. These two are separate. An ‘ISBN’ is an identifier that facilitates cataloguing and distribution of your book as a commercial product. ‘Copyright’ is legal protection of creative material.

In Australia, written material is automatically protected by copyright as soon as it is written or otherwise recorded in some way (e.g. on computer disk). There is no registration of copyright in Australia, and no other procedure that needs to be followed. For more information on Australian copyright laws, head to the Australian Copyright Council website: www.copyright.org.au and check out their downloadable information sheets.

Fill out my online form.