BookNet blog

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    What Does It Mean to Implement ONIX 3.0?

    It’s a vexing question. I like to explain ONIX for Books by separating out the standard (what you track as metadata) from the technical side (XML, which can be thankfully ignored in this post). ONIX as a standard is a way for two companies to exchange information about books without ambiguity by using published definitions.…

  • Mind-Control, Conscious Consumption, and Big Data: Caught in the mesh 2012 Conference

    The mesh conference is a must-attend conference for tech people in the GTA who don’t have the budget to attend the TED conferences. mesh looks to provide a platform for people to explore the latest trends in society, technology, and emerging business models across a number of disciplines. The audience is as diverse the presenters.…

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    Getting Data Dropped: Support and Update Your Records

    BNC BiblioShare has been getting queries from publishers asking why after dropping a record from their ONIX feed it hasn’t disappeared from The 49th Shelf. BiblioShare supplies data to a lot more firms than The 49th Shelf and that list is growing, but we like that you’re paying attention and finding problems in 49thShelf.com. Here’s…

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    A Lesson on Metadata

    Yesterday I took the second of four metadata BISG webinars. It featured our Bibliographic Manager (or, as I like to call him, our Data Czar), Tom Richardson, along side Richard Stark, Director of Product Data at Barnes & Noble. This webinar went over the 31 key data elements in ONIX, what they mean and why…

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    Canadian Bookshelf, eh?

    If you haven’t already visited, Canadian Bookshelf, I would highly recommend you take a little time to do so. The site itself looks great and there is a plethora of great (Canadian) content already there with more to come. I won’t go into all the features and functions of the site here as you can…

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    Proud to Be Canadian? Prove It. In ONIX.

    This is all to say that an awful lot of effort has gone into making sure Canadian authorship is prioritized in Canada, but if we don’t do our part it will be hard it won’t work. We are so proud of our Canadian books. Why aren’t we shouting it from the digital rooftops?

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    Best Practices for E-Books in ONIX

    What are the general guidelines for producing “good” ONIX support for e-books? Quality data exchange requires two things: clarity about how Product Identifiers are being used and the use of the ONIX 3.0 standard. Given that we are lacking both of these things, the answer to how to make a “good” e-book is a bit…

  • BNC 101: On Sale Date

    There are a lot of potential dates that can be listed in an ONIX record. In this post, we’re going to focus on Publication Date vs On Sale Date.

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    BNC 101: Publication Dates

    We’ve been hearing rumblings about publication date confusion when it comes to digital books. I’m going to cover publication dates here—for ebooks and print books—to settle the matter once and for all.

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    ONIX Is Easy

    At BookNet, we sometimes find ourselves trying to defend ONIX . People are often asking, “Why can’t it be easy?” But it is. After the last time I heard this I thought that a review of why ONIX is easy was due.