{"id":345,"date":"2012-05-04T10:14:05","date_gmt":"2012-05-04T17:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bitingduckpress.com\/?p=345"},"modified":"2020-11-24T18:44:52","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T02:44:52","slug":"barcodes-barcodes-barcodes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitingduckpress.com\/?p=345","title":{"rendered":"Barcodes, Barcodes, Barcodes!"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the big headaches in getting from a completed manuscript to a completed book is the ISBN and barcode. Getting an ISBN is a post or two of its own, but assuming you have them, people often want to charge you an arm and a leg (or a web!) to take a few digits and make a barcode that represents them.\u00a0 Every product on the planet has one, so they shouldn’t be that hard to get.<\/p>\n

It turns out that they’re not– the free software community (which we like, depend on, and try to contribute to when we can) has all sorts of nice tools, including bar code generators.\u00a0 A nice one that I’ve found is here at tux.org<\/a>.\u00a0 It runs online and generates an .eps or .pdf that you can paste onto your cover. If you really want to run it locally, you can also download the code (it’s in python) and run it yourself.<\/p>\n

It has detailed instructions with a lot of options.\u00a0 Fortunately, the author has put in default values that are generally good choices.\u00a0 The things you want to pay attention to are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Make sure you put in your ISBN correctly! If you leave the default value in to test it, it’s nice enough to put a big notice on the code it generates.\u00a0 But it’s still 13 digits plus a price code that you need to check.\u00a0 Check it twice, then check it again.<\/li>\n
  2. Put in a price code if you want one – the default value (90000) says “no suggested retail price”.\u00a0 If you’re in the US, your price code should start with a 5 and then be the 4 digits of the price with no decimal points (e.g. a $14.99 book will be 51499).\u00a0 If you’re in another country you can probably look at a book printed there and figure it out, or search around for a definitive answer.\u00a0 There’s a link from the detailed instructions that tells all about price codes.<\/li>\n
  3. Don’t mess with the colors.\u00a0 Many barcode readers will read things done in a range of colors, but many won’t, so stick to black and white and you’re probably ok.<\/li>\n
  4. Read the notes about scaling– you can rescale the codes to some limited extent, but be careful!\u00a0 Even if it makes the back of your book look less nice, it makes it easier to sell.<\/li>\n
  5. As he notes, there’s no warranty on what he generates.\u00a0 We don’t make any warranty about it either.\u00a0 That said, it does seem to make a well behaved barcode.<\/li>\n
  6. If you’re going to use it in some format other than .eps, save it at a very high quality.\u00a0 Some “lossy” image formats (I’m talking about you .jpg) can fuzz out the sharp edges and even put faint greyscale noise into the white spots.\u00a0 Barcode readers may get upset at you for this– they like nice sharp lines and high contrast.<\/li>\n
  7. TEST IT BEFORE YOU USE IT!\u00a0 Yes, I’m yelling.\u00a0 Print it on a piece of paper at the scale it’s going to be used with the stuff around it that you’re going to put there (it needs a bit of whitespace around it), then read it back.\u00a0 You can read it back with a smartphone app (my goto barcode reader is Red Laser<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s available free for most platforms and works well.\u00a0 If you know someone who can read it with a laser, even better.\u00a0 Or find a really geeky friend with a Cuecat<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    That about covers it for basic barcode generation– We’ll have some posts in the near future about getting ISBNs and some about using QR codes (those funny square “barcodes” that are popping up all over).\u00a0 We like to use QR codes at book fairs because people can use their phone camera to go straight to our website and bookmark it or find the book they want and get it in the format they want right there.\u00a0 It saves us from having to deal with selling books at a book fair table.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    One of the big headaches in getting from a completed manuscript to a completed book is the ISBN and barcode. Getting an ISBN is a post or two of its own, but assuming you have them, people often want to charge you an arm and a leg (or a web!) to take a few digits […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitingduckpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitingduckpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitingduckpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitingduckpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitingduckpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/bitingduckpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1348,"href":"https:\/\/bitingduckpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions\/1348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitingduckpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitingduckpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitingduckpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}