ONIX was originally developed in 2000 by the Association of American Publishers and EDItEUR. The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) in the US and Book Industry Communication (BIC) in the UK joined the team after that, and now there are representatives from around the world, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the Republic of Korea.

ONIX for Books is an international standard for exchanging important information about books and related products. ONIX stands for ONline Information eXchange and is an XML-based language used for computer-to-computer communication.

ONIX is a way of tagging information about your books — such as the ISBN, title, contributor, description, price, and availability. All of this data is needed to support the sale of your books in the supply chain, but it's also becoming more and more visible as websites and catalogues can use this metadata to populate their pages.

The ONIX codelists and their definitions form a common language for the book industry world wide that is separate from the XML-based ONIX feeds. EDItEUR’s definitions and codes should be used in any book metadata exchange system whether in ONIX or sent as a proprietorial Excel template.

Where can you see ONIX?

Look at any major online retailer. The information there is based on book metadata received in ONIX files. ONIX also underlays the business information used internally at retailers, wholesalers, and other industry players like Bookmanager.

ONIX is the basis for bibliographic descriptions in SalesData. Canadian publisher ONIX metadata appears as they send it in CataList as it's sourced from feeds sent to BiblioShare. CataList is the best place for Canadian publishers to learn how their data, as sent, displays.

ONIX is never directly available to consumers and there's no form of an ONIX reader available to them. It’s supplied to companies who load it to their databases. Some recipients, mostly retailers, run consumer facing websites displaying it, though there are sites like the ACP’s 49th Shelf who display book data for general use.

Displayed data is selected and modified based on the recipients needs but sending ONIX data as EDItEUR intends will work far better than modifying ONIX based on the needs of a single retailer.

All BookNet products strive to display data as intended by EDItEUR’s as well as other major standards like W3C's Display Techniques for EPUB Accessibility.

Why is ONIX important?

ONIX is crucial for effective marketing and for communicating with retailers and the customer. ONIX is how you transfer all of the information about your books that is needed to support sales. Information such as:

availability
embargo dates
expected shipping dates
prices in different currencies
publication dates
rights information
suppliers for countries and territories

For example, have you reduced a price? Updating it in your ONIX file lets a retailer know about it and could influence them to increase their order.

ONIX is also important for marketing since it allows you to include information that goes beyond the basics, such as:

awards
Canadian authorship
descriptions
excerpts
first chapters
headlines
initial print runs
links to images, video, and audio
more titles from the same author
other formats that the book is available in
promotions information
reviews and endorsements
series and sets
similar titles

For example, neglecting to include Canadian authorship and other regional information means that your titles will not appear in important discoverability platforms.

How can you make your ONIX files better?

Don’t make the ONIX file the responsibility of the one tech-savy person in the office. Instead, make it something everyone is responsible for throughout the life cycle of the book. An editor, publicist, rights associate, and sales manager all have different material they can add and update in an ONIX file.
Add the information as you get it instead of creating the ONIX file at the end of the process. You can create the ONIX file at acquisition and fill it out as material comes in.
Update your file when something changes and send it to your trading partners again. It should always be up-to-date.
Proofread your ONIX files. The sloppy errors that can be found in ONIX files are horrendous.