Books should have at a minimum an ISBN (for books published after 1975), be available at a dozen or more libraries and be catalogued by its country of origin's official or de facto national library. For example, in the United States books are catalogued by the Library of Congress; United Kingdom at the British Library; Australia at the National Library of Australia; Canada at the Library and Archives Canada; France at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Singapore at the National Library Board; in Brazil by the Fundação Biblioteca Nacional; Argentina at Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina; and in India at the National Library of India. For a complete list, see List of national libraries.
However, these are exclusionary criteria rather than inclusionary; meeting these threshold standards does not imply that a book is notable, whereas a book which does not meet them, most likely is not. There will be exceptions—books that are notable despite not meeting these threshold standards—but they will be rare and good reasons for the notability of such books should be made very clear.
[edit]Self-publication
In this regard, it should be especially noted that self-publication and/or publication by a vanity press indicates, but does not establish non-notability.[7] Exceptions do exist, such as Robert Gunther's Early Science in Oxford or Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane. Note however that both of these books would be considered notable by virtue (for instance) of criterion 1.
Taking the preceding threshold section into account, it should be noted that many vanity press books are assigned ISBN numbers, may be listed in a national library, and may be found through a Google Book Search, none of which implies they are notable.
It should always weigh against an article's inclusion if the author or another interested party is the creator of the Wikipedia article. See Wikipedia:Conflict of interest and Wikipedia:Autobiography for more information.
[edit]Online bookstores
A book's listing at online bookstores such as Barnes & Noble.com or Amazon.com is not by itself an indication of notability as both websites are non-exclusionary, including large numbers of vanity press publications. There is no present agreement on how high a book must fall on Amazon's sales rank listing (in the "product details" section for a book's listing) in order to provide evidence of its notability or non-notability.
