ISBN's et al. 19/07/10

Acquired two followers already. Thanks ladies – now I’d better think of something interesting to say.
Hmmm..... Interesting?..... Nope, can’t think of anything.
I have a seriously ripping new design for my web site but I can’t put it up yet until the registration and hosting transfer is complete – it uses technology the old hosting company doesn’t support.
I just thought of something. I have decided I hate Apple. Actually, having four crowns in my upper jaw I’ve been told in no uncertain terms not to eat them anyway. LOL. That sounded weak and lame even to me.
Apple, Sony, and I gather Borders, are now insisting that all e-books carried on their sites must have ISBN numbers. We’ve always followed the more traditional approach of only giving an e-book an ISBN if it’s over a certain length, our cut-off being 20,000 words. Other publishers use other lengths. Now, in order to get all of our ebooks carried on these sites we have to go back and retro-fit an ISBN number to all the older short stories. This involves a lot of fiddling around, recreating files and filling in forms. Unfortunately this means we need more ISBN numbers than we actually have allocated to us at this moment. The National Library of New Zealand will happily issue us another tranche of numbers, which remain free, but we need to have used the bulk of the existing allocation first – and by that they mean not merely allocate them but register them as well. Since the registration takes several days between us filling in the form and the registration being on their database I now have to do the operation in two batches, which disturbs the work flow.
All of this has to be done without disrupting existing work, can’t slow up the processing of new releases under any circumstances. That would give authors the feeling they should beat me to a pulp!
On a brighter note our next print release is fast approaching the final proof stage, I would hope the printer will be sending me the proof copy within the twenty-four/forty-eight hours. Their QA procedures are so tight we’ve never had a problem at this stage, so hopefully that will be out by the end of the week. Then we can move on to the next one, of course.
The treadmill never stops.