Paste a 13-digit ISBN, get a print-ready EAN-13 barcode in your browser — vector SVG that scales cleanly, plus a 600dpi PNG for everything else. No print order, no signup, no usage cap.
A 5-digit barcode to the right of the main one, encoding price or a price-range hint. Standard for US-bound titles; rare in UK trade. Your distributor will tell you if you need it.
Adds a hyphenated “ISBN” line above the barcode — helpful when the cover doesn’t print the ISBN elsewhere. Trade barcodes don’t require it but many publishers prefer it.
Buy one direct from Nielsen ISBN Store — the UK registry. Single ISBNs from £91, blocks of 10 from £169.
Standard EAN-13 barcode at 100% scale (X-dimension 0.33mm). Drop the SVG straight into InDesign, Illustrator or Affinity Publisher at any size you like — vectors don’t lose sharpness when you scale them.
Bottom-right of the back cover is the trade convention. Leave at least 5mm of clear quiet zone around the barcode — the SVG already includes it, but don’t crop into the white space.
EAN-13 will scan reliably between 80% and 200% of the standard size. The SVG ships at 100% (~37×26 mm). Below 80% scanners may struggle, especially under cling-wrap or in fluorescent light.
Black bars on a white background is the only safe combination. Don’t reverse it (light on dark), don’t use red ink, and avoid printing it directly over patterned backgrounds — quiet zone has to be clean.
Yes. No account, no usage cap, no watermark, no “upgrade for higher resolution.” The barcode generator runs entirely in your browser — we don’t even see the ISBN you typed. Same logic as our free ONIX 3.0 editor: small tools that adjacently support print are worth more to us than charging a few quid for them.
SVG for print artwork — it’s vector, so it stays sharp at any size in InDesign, Illustrator, Affinity, Word, anything that opens it. PNG for non-print uses — web pages, ebook covers, social media, anywhere you need a raster image. The PNG is rendered at 600 dpi which is plenty for print at the displayed size, but vector beats raster every time when artwork will be scaled.
The last digit of an ISBN-13 is a check digit computed from the first 12 — it catches typos. If the tool says your check digit is wrong, you’ve almost certainly mistyped one of the earlier digits. The error message tells you what the check digit should be; use that to work back to which earlier digit got swapped or transposed.
Not for UK trade. The optional 5-digit add-on to the right of the main barcode encodes the price (or 90000 meaning “no price encoded”). It’s common in the US — the convention is 5XXXX where XXXX is the price in cents (so 51299 = $12.99) — and almost never used in UK trade. If your distributor has given you a 5-digit code, flip the “Add price add-on” toggle in the tool and paste it in. Don’t guess your own; ask the distributor.
ISBN-10 was retired for trade barcodes in 2007. Convert yours to ISBN-13 first: prepend 978, drop the old check digit, recalculate the new check digit. Most ISBN registries (including Nielsen) will give you the 13-digit form on request, and most ISBN-10 → ISBN-13 converters online get it right. Then come back here.
You need one to sell a book in the trade. Buy from your country’s registry: Nielsen ISBN Store in the UK, Bowker in the US, Library and Archives Canada in Canada, and so on. Single ISBNs are typically £80–£100; blocks of 10 are much cheaper per unit if you’re publishing more than one title.
Same deal — free, browser-based, no print order required. Twelve tabs, every EDItEUR codelist current, schema-validated XML you can hand to your distributor.
Open the ONIX editor