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 creating.
Midlist: I Will Survive!
Chelsea wrote about James McGrath Morris’s piece in HuffPo last Tuesday and made some really enlightening observations (“Every title is ‘face-out’ online’—Chelsea, you’re blowing my mind!).
It’s true that metadata, a.k.a. the ONIX files that publishers craft so carefully and thoroughly, can actually make midlist authors more visible online. This not only impacts ebooks, but regular books too.
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.
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?
New ONIX Tools...Now with 3.0
Today we are happy, no ecstatic, to announce the release of one new ONIX converter and an upgraded BNC Excel Template to ONIX converter. This might not be exciting to everyone, but to us metadata junkies this is a little like a Data Festivus. So exactly what do we have?
ONIXEdit vs. EXA Editor
EXA Editor is the venerable XML editor for use with ONIX that BookNet Canada made available as a free download for the past few years. It was an excellent product with a not-so-excellent GUI (nerdese for your ability to find and click on things) and a useful tool for learning about ONIX. A number of publishers’ ONIX programs are, or were, based on it.Here’s how the new ONIXEdit stacks up.
Happy Birthday, ONIX!
The BiblioShare Certification Challenge
BNC BiblioShare is going gangbusters with over 230,000 EANs in the system, over 12,000 Canadian author markers and aggregators starting to experiment with the data. It seems like a good time to take stock.
Data Exchange Tip #6: A DIY Guide to Schema Validation on a PC—XML Notepad 2007
For the purist, those who want their XML validation without the added benefits of what some programmer thinks would improve their ONIX file, there is a lovely generic XML software product called XML Notepad 2007. It’s free and written by a Microsoft programmer, Chris Lovett, so the freeware is from a safe source, it’s easy to set-up for a schema validation and robust with files as large as 20,000 records.
