The Secret Code of the ISBN

One of the questions I was asked at the Mendocino Coast Writer's Conference was, "What is an ISBN?" There was a great deal of discussion about what that weird bar code on the back of each book means and when a book needs to have one. Not all books do, but if you want to sell a book through a retail outlet, you need one.

Authors don't really need to know what the numbers in the bar code mean (unless their book nerds like me), but every publisher does. The bar code is like the symbol ranchers use t