Library and Archives Canada (LAC) provides Canadian publishers with ISBNs in exchange for registering books with the legal deposit program.

The Legal Deposit of Publication Regulation SOR/2006-337 under the Library and Archives of Canada Act states:

• provide digital copies of publications using a medium other than paper to the LAC archivist via the online depository;
• must deposit one copy of “publications of which fewer than 100 copies have been produced.”

EMSA Publishing is registered as a publisher with the LAC for the purpose of assigning ISBN numbers to its publications. One copy of each publication is sent to the LAC at the author’s expense until 100 copies have been published, at which point, the author will be prompted to cover the cost of sending a second copy to the LAC.

Books published with Amazon KDP as the publisher of record use an Amazon-issued ISBN. In this case, no deposit with the LAC is necessary. As Ingram-Spark does not issue its own ISBNs, the author must cover the cost of the book purchase and shipping to the LAC depository.

Books published with LAC assigned ISBNs will be reported to Bowker Link Publisher Access System for cataloguing.