The barcode is just the ISBN
A book barcode is an EAN-13 symbol, and the thirteen digits it encodes are your ISBN. Nothing else. It is not a separate registration, there is nobody else to apply to, and it carries no extra information about the book.
This matters because it means you cannot have a barcode before you have an ISBN. Every cover design is blocked on that number arriving.
The digits are printed underneath the bars in human-readable form, and the ISBN is conventionally printed above the symbol as well, in the hyphenated form, so a bookseller can read it without a scanner.
The second, smaller barcode
Many books carry a short five-digit barcode to the right of the main one. This is the add-on, and it is where most of the confusion lives.
It is a price code, and it is a United States and Canada convention. The convention is that the first digit says which currency and the remaining four give the price: 51299 means US $12.99, 50999 means US $9.99.
It exists because American retail systems were built to read the price off the cover. It was never a worldwide requirement, and it causes an obvious problem if your book is sold in more than one country, or if you ever change the price — the printed cover now says something untrue.
What Indian publishers should put there
Use 90000.
In the add-on convention, 90000 is the value meaning 'no price encoded'. It is the correct choice for a book that is not priced in US dollars, which includes every book priced in rupees, and it is what Indian publishers should use.
The alternative is to leave the add-on off entirely, which is also acceptable and is what many publishers outside the US do. What you should not do is encode a dollar price you have invented, or a rupee figure in a field that will be read as dollars.
Where it goes on the cover
Bottom right of the back cover, as a rule, and the practical requirements are about the scanner rather than the design.
The symbol needs to sit in a clear area of solid white — not a tint, not a pale photograph, not a gradient. A scanner reads contrast, and a barcode printed over an image is a barcode that does not scan at a till.
Leave a reasonable margin of white around it on all sides, and keep it clear of the two edges where it can be damaged: the spine fold and the trimmed edge of the cover. A quarter of an inch of clearance from each is a sound minimum.
- A clear white area of roughly 2 inches wide by 1.2 inches tall is enough for the symbol plus its quiet zone.
- Keep at least 0.25 inches between the barcode and the spine fold, and the same from the trim edge.
- Do not place it inside the bleed area — it will be cut into.
- Black bars on white. Not white on black, not coloured bars, not reversed out.
- Do not scale it to fit a gap. Distorting the proportions or shrinking it too far makes it unreadable.
Where to get the image
If you print through a print-on-demand platform, it will generate and place the barcode for you at no charge — Amazon's KDP does this, and its cover template reserves a space for it. You do not need to supply one, and if you do supply one you can end up with two.
If you are printing with a local printer, generate it yourself from your ISBN. Any reputable EAN-13 generator will do it, and your designer or typesetter will normally handle it as part of the cover file.
Nobody should be charging you a meaningful amount of money for a barcode. It is a rendering of a number you already have.
Check it with a phone
When your proof copy arrives, scan the barcode with a phone. Any free scanner app will read an EAN-13 and show you the digits.
Compare those digits against your ISBN, one by one, including the final check digit. A transposed pair in the middle of a thirteen-digit number is invisible to the eye and fatal at a till — it points at a different book, or at no book at all.
Do this on the printed proof, not on screen. Print quality, ink spread and paper all affect whether a real scanner can read it.