Whats the difference between the Premium ISBN and the Free ISBN? Which is better?
We recommend the FREE ISBN because it’s free. We pay for the ISBN so you don’t have to. The Premium ISBN offers no advantage over the free ISBN. Unless you’re a publisher of multiple authors, the Premium ISBN is essentially a vanity ISBN for those who feel it’s important to be listed as the “publisher” in the Bowker Books in Print Database, a database few readers will ever view (most readers search for books via title and author name searches at Google and online bookstores). Of all the Smashwords retailers, only Sony polls Bowker for data in the ISBN record, and the data in your ISBN record is almost always less accurate than the data in your Smashwords account. The FREE ISBN is available to any Smashwords author, anywhere in the world. Although it registers Smashwords as the “publisher” in the Bowker record, we are not your publisher. This designation is due only to the legacy limitations of Bowker’s categorization options for ISBNs. If Smashwords is listed as your publisher in the I
