BookNet blog

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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.

  • BNC 101: ISTCs

    An ISTC is a new way of linking different formats of the same book. Unlike an ISBN, it is tied to the book and only the book, not the publisher. A simple example is using an ISTC to link the hardcover, trade paper, mass market, and epub versions of a title. Even though each format…

  • BNC 101: BISAC Classification

    What are BISAC codes? How should you use them? Where are they used? Here’s a handy guide to everything you need to know about BISAC codes.

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    Increase Sales and Lower Costs with Better Metadata

    More and more digital platforms are sourcing their content from ONIX files, which makes it easy for publishers to take part without increasing their workload. The catch, though, is that the information needs to be in the ONIX files to be shared, and currently most publishers are not including enough information in the files they’re…