I had a lovely, quiet morning at Rockport State Park. I’ve been doing a lot of online work and canine caretaking lately, and I haven’t been out to my favorite parks as much as I usually am when I’m out west. It was lovely to get a morning to take off with my sketchbook, do several favorite short trails, sit and watch the river a little a bit, and do a couple of sketches. It was my reward for doing ISBN and Library of Congress research after breakfast.

I’m learning all kinds of things about self publishing, which is good, since I’ll be doing it quite soon. My inner book nerd was happy when I found one source that said ISBN numbers were begun by British bookseller W.H.Smith (a favorite from my university days). They needed a cataloging system for their books and hired a former WWII code breaker to create one. It was later adopted widely.

Books need a different ISBN for each edition - hardcover, softcover, ebook, etc. You can buy them in bundles of 10 if you’re self publishing, or you can just get one. Once you have an ISBN number you can apply for free for a Library of Congress number, which is cool and also necessary if any libraries might want to carry your book. I’m going to get more serious about applications soon, but the hike first was very welcome.