Please verify a no ISBN issue

[Tal]

The specifics would help in this case, to be able to identify why the same book is selling with and without the ISBN identified on different bookseller sites. Ebooks, especially self published ones tend to deviate from typical industry publishing practices. Many times the only place you will find a book identifier for ebooks is on the bookseller site (and not all ebook sellers even have a field for it) not anywhere in the digital file. When it is there it might or might not be on the title page, sometimes I've found it at the end of the file. This is more from lack of experience than intent.

Here's a question I think you need to ask yourself, is the only difference in these editions you are creating the "missing" ISBN? Are the covers, publish date, format and page counts the same?

[Tal]

I thought it might be ARe as I see this all the time because of Smashwords. ;-)

Bear with me here since it gets pretty complicated and I don't want you to end up in the weeds. The example book you give was published through Smashwords. They can assign a "free" ISBN when you publish through them which assigns them as your publisher (they bought & registered the ISBN not the indie author) and they do this because some of the ebook retailers in their distribution channels require ISBN's for epubs. Kobo & iBooks for example. So if a book is published through Smashwords and it gets the "free" ISBN, that number will follow the epub format of that title throughout the SW distribution channels. It is only valid for the epub format, not a mobi or pdf format. ARe is not in the SW distribution channel so when the author uploaded their book there they left the ISBN field blank and ARe assigned their own store id. SW frowns upon authors using the SW supplied ISBN outside of their distribution channels and advises authors who wish to do this to purchase their own ISBNs.

So, if you look inside your book that you got from ARe you will see the Smashwords licensing terms without any ISBN listed and it's also not listed in the books available from the other sellers even though it's listed on the book product page. SW advises authors not to list the ISBN on the copyright page as a general rule unless you specify that it's for the epub format only. This is because many online ebook stores convert the source uploaded into multiple formats (mobi & pdf) and the SW ISBN does not legally apply to the mobi or pdf format. Clear as mud yet?

If you downloaded the epub format of the book from ARe, I personally would consider that the same as the edition with the ISBN. If you downloaded the mobi or the pdf, technically the SW ISBN associated with the epub version would not apply. Complicating matters is the fact that GR does not distinguish between different formats of ebooks except for Kindle & Nook. If you downloaded any format other than epub you can make the case that an edition without ISBN should exist since SW licensing of the ISBN only applies to the epub format. Not sure my answer helps you but good luck. :D