A few weeks ago The Huffington Post posted an article by James McGrath Morris called “Will eBooks Make Midlist Authors Extinct?”, a suggestion so dramatic (a.k.a Internet-friendly) that it led to much linking and re-blogging within the publishing community.
BNC 101: What Is ONIX?
ONIX for Books is an international standard for exchanging important information about books and related products.Here we take you through the basics: what you need to know about ONIX and how to use it.
Metadata Standards Visualization
The sheer number of metadata standards in the cultural heritage sector is overwhelming, and their inter-relationships further complicate the situation. A new resource, Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe, is intended to assist planners with the selection and implementation of metadata standards.
With Digital Publishing, Bad Data = Lost Sales
Kobo gives us some examples of how data issues can impact your book sales in the digital market.Sending good quality metadata in the first place will help you get your books to your readers on time. And that’s what we all want, right?
I asked Michael to list the most common metadata issues they see at Kobo. Here is his list (in order).
BNC 101: What Is XML?
What is XML? is the first in a series of BNC 101 blog posts where we’re going to try our best to break down some of the complex tech concepts we talk about all the time into plain language.
XML is a term that gets thrown around the publishing industry a lot, but what does it actually mean?
Reading the Future
According to the results of The Bookseller’s recently released Reading the Future study, an annual survey of UK consumer reading habits, people are either getting tired of this whole digital-reading thing or just learned it exists.
ISBNs: It’s 11PM—Do You Know Where Your Product Records Are?
You’d think you were at Market Day in Ganges there’s such PANDEMONIUM out there. Everyone’s talking about Product Identifiers — live twitter discussions, position papers staked by major organizations, and the BISG has no less than two dedicated industry groups (maybe three) discussing issues around ISBNs, e-Books and ISTC to make sure that their supply chain perspective is heard.
I’m lucky enough to be able to participate in some of the BISG discussion, quietly like a good Canadian will, but I know the Canadian supply chain wants to know what to do.
Should Hyperlinks Be in E-Books?
As a flurry of excitement mounts about the ebook, the iBookstore and various claims about ebook sales (Naturally, as part of BNC’s staff, I second Nic Boshart’s skepticism and also say “Show me the numbers!”), publishers are spending a lot of time and energy wondering what the ultimate ebook should look like.
Evernote to the Fore
“Build products people lust after”
This is the advice given by the founders of Atlassian during the Atlassian Starter Day conference and it spurred me to write about Evernote (with a dash of Safari 5).
I have had Evernote on my laptop for a while but since I have been using my iphone more recently I’ve really become enamoured with Evernote.
