Does your book have a URL? Of course it does and it doesn't have to be that long string of “stuff” you keep sending people when they want a link to your book. Here is how to shorten the link for a more friendly-looking link to your eBook or book.
First, be sure you have:
- Both the long (ISBN-13) and short (ISBN-10) ISBN*, assuming you have an ISBN.
- For Amazon Kindle books you need your eBook's ASIN, or Amazon Standard Identification Number.
- For Barnes & Noble Nook books you need your eBook's BN ID, or Barnes & Noble ID.
If you don't have these written down you can find them on a book's detail page in each store where the book is being sold.
Link (URL) examples for Amazon, Barnes & Noble Nook & print options, and Apple:
Amazon Kindle eBooks
Amazon has a URL shortener you can use called amzn.com. You can use either of these for your Kindle eBook. Replace the number bolded here with your ASIN. Example:
http://www.amzn.com/B01BX7Q02K
Or
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BX7Q02K/
Amazon Print Books
Amazon uses the ISBN-10 number for print books rather than the ASIN. Again, replace the bolded number with your ISBN-10 number. Example:
http://www.amzn.com/0615710735
Or
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0615710735
Barnes & Noble Nook eBooks
Like Amazon's ASIN, B&N uses its own internal numbering system called a BN ID. Look up your book's BN ID and replace it in the bolded example below:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/2940016166087
Barnes & Noble Print Books
B&N differs from Amazon in that they use the longer ISBN-13 rather than ISBN-10 for print books. Replace the bolded ISBN-13 in the example below with your ISBN-13:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/9780979439124
Apple
You cannot send someone a link to buy your book from the iTunes store but you can link them to what is called an iTunes Preview. If the individual wants to buy your book they will need to download and install iTunes if they don't already have it.
Place your ISBN-13 number at the end the URL: http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/isbn, like this:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/isbn9780961772154
But what if you don't have an ISBN? Like Amazon and B&N, Apple assigns their own ID to every eBook and you'll find it in your iTunes connect account. The format in this case is to ad ID instead of ISBN:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id594062484
Linking with affiliate codes
Last week I talked about setting up an Associates account so you could earn a commission if someone buys a product after you send them to Amazon. You can read about that here. If you go this route you are back to a long URL unless you shorten the link, which is a whole other topic.
* what is the difference between ISBN-13 and ISBN-10? “13” has a prefix that identifies the country of origin, 978 is the U.S. and the last digit is what's called a check digit. It helps to make sure the number is valid and it differs between the “10” and “13” numbers. Here is our post about ISBN numbers for eBooks.
bn.com/s/2940016166087
is even shorter
Here’s what the Kobo User Guide says (not that it provides a short link, but it makes your excellent list more complete):
To drive reader s to a particular eBook on Kobo, you can drop your eBook’s ISBN into the following formula:
http://www.kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=%5BeISBN-13%5D
For example, if your eBook’s ISBN is 9781440697661, your link would be: http://www.kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=9781440697661
Sandra, thanks for taking the time to add this. I looked everywhere for it…except the user guide. Figures.
I wanted to thank you for this good read!! I definitely loved every little bit of it. I have you bookmarked to look at new things you post…
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Thanks for asking. I don’t mind as long as it is excerpts and there is a link back to where you quoted from. Send me a link to the page when you do. Cheers.
Highly useful, thankyou:)
Excellent article. I certainly appreciate this website.
I have some ePub files on an iPad. But I need to classify them into different categories according to some correlation, so I wanna create an e-Book(ePub format) for each category, and it only has a Table of Contents, which has links to some ePub files. I know how to make or edit ToC (a basically a html file), but I don’t know what hyperlink (URL) it should be to link to each ePub file in the app iBooks.
Your help is highly appreciated.
It sounds like you want to create an eBook that has links to other eBooks, but this would live on your device. That doesn’t sound possible but the one to ask is Apple since it is their device.
I read this before and seriously, I didn’t get it. It just didn’t click. I think I was under the impression that there was a step missing.
Now I see that it is really as simple as typing in the information… LIFESAVER!
Super article, merci pour le partage !
I had tried all this before I read your article, using only the http://www.amazon.com/dp/asin for my Kindle book. It took me to the Amazon error screen, saying they couldn’t find the page. I tried it again with your amzn shortcut. Same result. Finally, I tried it with my ten digit ISBN for my print book. Same result. I even went to my book on Amazon, copied the URL and tried that. Same result. I’m getting very tired of seeing dogs (on the error page) and very frustrated. I’m using WordPerfect, but have managed a link to my sign-up page, so am not sure what’s going on.
It could be something to do with how WordPerfect is formatting them since the example links work fine. Good luck.
Great post!
Very helpful and short article. It really helped me a lot to publish some links on my social media accounts.