Has one become a Fogey?

Victor Meldrew

In 1985, when Sam&Sam needed an ISBN number for N.A. Berdiaev, Aforizmy, I rang up the then registration agency and they sent me a form by post. I filled the form in (by hand, of course) and sent it back to them with a cheque for under £20 (I can’t remember the exact figure). About ten days later, I received a postcard with the number and publication details of the book on. The whole operation had taken fifteen minutes and a ten-day wait.

Today the ISBN service has been, as they say, privatised. It is run by the Nielsen Corporation based in New York. On 12 January 2018 I logged into their UK ISBN Store and was fairly rapidly relieved of £159 for ten ISBN numbers. Note that to buy a single one costs £89, so if you are ever going to publish another book it is in your interest to purchase ten in one go. On the other hand, a comparison of the two figures suggests that £89 is the product of rapacity red in tooth and claw, especially as a modern book has to have an ISBN number… Nielsen have been handed a monopoly!

In effect, I had parted with £159 for a single number, a mere number generated by a computer. Well, not quite, because the text in bold that came with the ten numbers recommended that I use ‘the free online service, Nielsen Title Editor, to supply forthcoming titles and to submit updates to existing product data’. This sounded a good idea, except that it wasn’t free at all, as you could only use it if you had already bought your ISBN number, and of course you had to marry your publication details to the number at some point, because the two weren’t going to come to you on a postcard.

On 22 January at 9.10 I set about registering with the Nielsen Title Editor. It was quite a long template and rejected my data several times. One problem was that it didn’t like the ISBN number I was putting in, another that it kept supplying the wrong telephone number for my address and rejecting the real one, but the worst was that there seemed to be no United Kingdom, Great Britain, Britain, or England on the mile-long alphabetical list of countries to input. At 9.30 I therefore emailed ‘Pubhelp Editorial’. Clearly they are used to such questions, because at 10.01 they emailed me to explain the format in which ISBNs must be input (there was nothing on the template to say) and that ‘United Kingdom’, for some unexplained reason, was ‘5th on the drop down list’. I made these adjustments and at 10.32 received an email confirming my registration. But… ‘Please allow 5 to 10 working days for your name and password for Nielsen Title Editor to be issued.’

(Interpolation: the reason I waited ten days before I tackled registering with the Nielsen Title Editor was that I had received a clear signal from the blurb which came with the ISBN numbers that things didn’t move quickly in this system, so I’d best allow a few days for the numbers to sink into it; also the verbosity of the blurb and the news that it would take 7-10 working days to get an ID and password to me had a damping effect. In a word, the user-unfriendliness of everything so far was a factor in slowing the process down, so I believe the ten-day delay is rightly included in the total experience.)

The following day, 23 January, I received an email from ‘Data Production and Client Services’ at 14.05 asking me how my ‘e-books/digital products are distributed to customers’, as this information was needed to ‘set up your account [never mentioned before] properly’. I supplied the information at 14.23 and at 16.32 came the riveting news that it had been sent to ‘our Supply Data team, who will create the internal codes needed for your organisation, and then send them back to me so that I can continue with your application. This will take a few more [!] working days, and you will be emailed your login details in due course [!]’.

Only two days later I received my username and password (the second so far) from Nielsen, but it came with two riders: (1) although I could access my Title Editor account straightaway, I couldn’t add ‘new title records or make amendments to existing title records for the next 24 hours as any changes made through the site may be lost [!]’, and (2) ‘if you have just registered your first title with us it may take 3-5 [!] weeks to become visible through the Title Editor site’. I waited five weeks, but it wasn’t visible. Another session followed with the Help desk on 2 March, from 11.47 to 12.39, then I got to my record and was able to edit it.

On 5 March came an email from Nielsen informing me that I had ‘registered for Nielsen BookNet Web Online Order Collection Service’, which I had never heard of before. I would have been almost disappointed if it had not come with another ID and password.

Now admittedly the process of acquiring the ten ISBN numbers took only about half an hour (as opposed to a quarter in 1985), but to get my title registered with this ISBN number and visible took two hours and thirty-two minutes of my time and a wait of 39 days compared with ten in 1985. Altogether, the process had taken a quarter of an hour and ten days in 1985 and three hours and 49 days in 2018.

Personally, I think a measured, mature, rational and dispassionate assessment of this process of Nielsen’s suggests that it is not fit for purpose (though the staff are marvellous). However, I am aware that the very act of comparing the purchase of an ISBN number tied to one’s book in 1985 with the process that that involves in 2018 suggests I am just a Fogey. I admit that may be the explanation for my splenetic frustration with the process, but even so the comparison of time intervals is…in-teresting, isn’t it?

In my next post I will look at a more poetic recent case of the same thing, before drawing any Meldrewesque general conclusions about modern life. But in the meantime, I have two questions to followers of the blog and anyone else out there:

1. How/why do the young, i.e. anyone under thirty, who are surely used to efficient, ‘real time’ communication on computers, put up with the sort of torture perpetrated on customers by Nielsen UK ISBN Store?

2. Can anyone with modern business and management experience explain to me how such a nebula of inefficiency and fatuousness comes about?

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2 Responses to Has one become a Fogey?

  1. John Dewey says:

    A depressing tale, Patrick. You’re certainly not alone in morphing into Victor Meldrew. From a rational viewpoint computers should make life simpler, and in many ways they do. The trouble is that companies have got wise to the possibilities offered by computerisation of offloading much of the work involved onto their customers. This is of course a no-brainer for them, but a pain in the neck for the rest of us. Perhaps it’s time we started fighting back. Militant Fogeys unite!

    For anyone else out there contemplating self-publishing I’d certainly recommend doing so through Brimstone Press (www.brimstonepress.co.uk; go to their ‘Advice’ page). For a single setup fee of £150 (£100 for any subsequent books published with them) they provide an ISBN number and deal without all the hassle of Nielsen Bookdata registration. This is of course in addition to all the other services provided by Brimstone. Compared with Nielsen’s outrageous charge for a single ISBN no. this is excellent value, which Brimstone is able to achieve by purchasing their ISBN nos. in bulk.

    • Patrick Miles says:

      Thank you, John! I am assured by some emails that we are not so much GOG’s (grumpy old gits) à la Meldrew, as ‘just’ Fogeys! (Not, note, Old Fogeys, which would presumably not be PC.) Yes, you are quite right about companies’ wheeze of getting the customer to do the work — I shall be touching on it in the next post. It reminds me of a Russian friend circa 1974 who used to say: ‘In the Soviet Union the customer is always wrong.’ You do feel as though you are being treated like dirt by firms with these awful, timewasting websites. Brimstone’s deal is excellent. The only thing I will say about my own purchase of ten from Nielsen is that it has positively encouraged me to bring out more Sam&Sam books!

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