How do I recover a lost ISBN book number?
Dave’s Answer: This is an interesting question because there are a number of things we need to consider when thinking about your answer. Specifically the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) system wasn’t introduced until the early 1970s, so you’re good in that department: your book wasn’t published prior to that date, which would have meant you couldn’t have had an ISBN. On the other hand you say that you self published a book which is likely problematic: most self-published works are not assigned an ISBN number, so it’s likely that you don’t have an ISBN number in the first place. Further, if you have a copy of the book (or the original manuscript) then I would imagine that somewhere in that book, either on the first page or even the back cover, you would have added your ISBN number or even had it appear as a bar code. There are a number of different tools that let you try and search known databases of published works for a specific ISBN too, but let’s start by checking out the
