Clarification on ISBN status in Rwanda

Editor,Reference is made to Gitura Mwaura’s article, Rwanda deserves national ISBN issuing agency (The New Times, November 28), and another one that had earlier been written by Stephen Mugisha titled ‘Lack of ISBN is hurting the local publishing industry’.As mentioned by Gitura, there are 150 national ISBN agencies, and this means that not all individual countries have agencies.This can be for a variety of reasons – lack of interest, lack of an appropriate body that is willing to act as the ISBN agency on a national basis, small publishing output, etc. A couple of the countries don’t have national ISBN agencies such as Belgium and Iraq.For a country to have a local ISBN agency, application to the International ISBN Agency is done and acceptance is based on due consideration of publishing output, capacity of the agency to provide ISBN to all the publishers, including authors acting as publishers, the charges for ISBN assignment to publishers to mention but a few.For the case of Rwanda, application by the National Library was made and the International ISBN Agency reviewed it and has been working with us to ensure all requirements are met.In October 2013, the International ISBN Agency Board agreed in principle that the National Library of Rwanda should be the national ISBN agency and we are in the process of finalising the process.In the meantime as we haven’t started issuing out ISBN, publishers who need ISBN have been advised to contact the agency in France.This is for their benefit and not because the International ISBN Agency has denied Rwanda the right to our ISBN Country Code.Jennifer Turatsinze Director, Rwanda National Library

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Clarification on ISBN status in Rwanda