ONIX implementers rejoice: 3.1.2 is here!

In October 2024, EDItEUR — the organization that manages the ONIX for Books standard, among others — announced the release of ONIX 3.1.2:

This is a very minor update of ONIX 3.1, with the addition of a single new field <PostalCode> (or <x590>). In turn, and alongside some existing fields, this enables the inclusion of full postal addresses within <ProductContact> and <SupplyContact> – enabling publishers and others to supply retailers with postal addresses related to product safety. This is a requirement for the upcoming EU General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR), which will be enforced from mid-December this year. GPSR applies to essentially all consumer products.

The only other changes in 3.1.2 are an increase in suggested maximum length of the text in <ProductFormFeatureDescription> to allow longer lists of GPS coordinates for EUDR, and addition of the new <PostalCode> tag in <EventOccurrence> because all the other elements of a street address were already present there.

This release follows a flurry of edits and inclusions to the ONIX codelists over the past several years, including the release of ONIX 3.1.1 in March 2024.

ONIX 3.1.1 … allows the expression of EU-style opt-outs from the copyright exception applying to non-research uses of text and data mining (e.g., for training large language models) with collateral material. It has been possible to express such opt-outs on product content for some time, but revision 1 extends this to long descriptions, tables of contents, reading guides, cover images and other resources which are included in or linked from Block 2 of ONIX. The other additions enable identifiers for literary prizes, and a textual expression of the copyright statement in addition to the structured copyright owner data.

Version 3.1.1 is fully backwards compatible with the previous 3.1 release – any correctly-constructed ONIX 3.1 remains valid under 3.1.1, and most ONIX 3.0 files can be easily converted to 3.1.

BookNet Canada acknowledges the dedication of the EDItEUR staff team in Graham Bell and Chris Saynor for their work to stay on top of an ever-evolving regulatory environment coming out of the EU, coordinating feedback from a global ONIX user base in order to support global trade, and sustaining an aggressive series of releases.

The ONIX 3.1 Specification, the Implementation and Best Practice Guide and various schema files available from EDItEUR have been updated and are available for download:

• ONIX for Books specification & most recent codelists release (PDF in .zip)

• ONIX for Books specification & most recent codelists release & Best Practice Guide (HTML in .zip RECOMMENDED — includes Specification)

Further reading

• If you're selling books in Europe, print or digital, and don't yet know about or understand how European regulations and directives are different and will affect your ability to sell in that market within the next year, you need to start asking questions. For more information, an overview on GPSR (General Product Safety Regulation), EUDR (EU Deforestation Regulation), and EAA( European Accessibility Act) and a deep dive on the upcoming deforestation regulations are recommended.

• Read the full release announcement and list of changes from 3.1.1 to 3.1.2 here.

• For full background, an overview of the message structure, and a summary of key differences between Release 2.1 and Release 3.0/3.1, read the Introduction to ONIX for Books 3.1 here.

If you are interested in keeping up-to-date with bibliographic standards, visit BookNet’s User Documentation.