So to start with, what on earth is definitely an ISBN? An ISBN can be an International Standard Book Number. An ISBN is basically an item number that's utilized by publishers, booksellers and libraries for ordering, listing and stock control purposes. It allows them to recognize a specific book - your book - from between the millions which can be in circulation at any one time.
If you are a publisher... and you are a publisher if you should be planning to publish only one book... you then are eligible for take advantage (isbn and barcode) of the ISBN system. That's, so long as what you may are publishing may be referred to as a book, manual or report that will probably be sold to the public. (Regular publications like magazines and newsletters don't have ISBNs, they've ISSNs.)
Strictly, there's no legal requirement (in the UK or Republic of Ireland at least) to have an ISBN at all. It is an optional system. And the ISBN system isn't the state register of books as such. But there are plenty of reasons for getting an ISBN for your book, even if you envisage it's only going to be a fairly small project initially.
So how do having an ISBN boost sales of one's book? Well, if you intend to sell your publication through bookshops like WH Smith or Waterstones or whatever, or Internet booksellers like Amazon, they'll need you with an ISBN which means that your book could be handled by their internal processing and ordering systems. The ISBN also provides use of book databases, such as BookFind Online, which are organised using ISBNs. These databases are employed by booksellers and libraries to simply help them find books for their customers. So, let's say you've published a good book on using and choosing e-commerce shopping cart software systems and a customer walks in and requests a book on shopping cart systems. There's every chance your book is going to be located and ordered. It could mean hundreds or 1000s of extra sales just for the slight effort of getting an ISBN!
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