Yes, you can publish your book without ISBN. It doesn’t make your book unsafe or freely available to be pirated by people. If you print my Facebook post without my permission, I can sue you. People sue over the originality of social media posts.
Also, ISBN doesn’t mean whoever is desperate enough to steal your work won’t go ahead. If you can drag them to court because you have ISBN, you can also drag them if you don’t have it.
The purpose of ISBN is mainly to give revenue to the government and to put the name and details of your book in an INTERNATIONAL BOOK REGISTER like a database where people can go to and check for some details on your book like Title, publisher and number of sales. I’m not sure Nigeria can boast of reliable data as touching this even with your ISBN.
HERE IS IT
1. If you are releasing an e-copy, don’t let ISBN stop you. You don’t need it. Amazon and other digital stores will even allow you to sell your books without ISBN.
2. If you are printing just few copies and you are selling it directly to people, you don’t need it.
3. If you are printing a lot of copies of your book, say 100 copies and above, it costs you nothing to get an ISBN because it’s just around 10k.
Summary- ISBN shouldn’t stop your e-book or few printing.
If you are printing more, you are already spending money, adding ISBN cost shouldn’t be an issue.
If you have not read my article on BECOMING AN AUTHOR, go grab it!
I hope this sends relief.
