Why do ONIX
ONIX is an XML-based standard created by a consortium of publishers, wholesalers, retailers, and data aggregators in response to the publishing industry’s need to be able to communicate better information about titles. ONIX stands for Online Information Exchange.
Unfortunately, because the standard is potentially trying to cover all aspects of the supply chain it has to be fairly complex to cover all eventualities. In addition it is a technical standard that requires a technical IT solution which immediately creates a barrier to entry for most small publishers who do not have a team of dedicated IT support staff and developers standing by.
So do you have to do it? Can you just ignore it and continue on as you always have. Increasingly the answer to that is no. All the big distributors are now pushing for publishers to submit their title data in an ONIX form (for them it is a major cost saving not to have to send copies of AI sheets to India to be re-keyed!) and whilst they currently do not directly impose punitive financial penalties for not conforming there is a price to be paid. That price is exposure of your work to your target audience the customer. If you do not have rich bibliographic data available on the major book selling web sites putting your work forward in its best possible light then some other publisher will and their work will appear before yours in any online searches and they will get the sale.
Some little factoids might put this in perspective:
- Bowkers customer data suggests that online ads are now better than print ads (9%) for driving sales. Online ads (16%) are the second biggest driver of book awareness in US second only to in-store displays (44%).
- 67% of customers who bought a book because of a review, read the review online.
- In 2005 Barnes & Noble found that a book is 60% more likely to sell if it has a cover image yet 63.7% of the titles in their database didn’t have one or indeed complete descriptions.
So implementing ONIX can potentially be a competitive advantage in the short/medium term but in the end it will be a necessity especially as books/content are delivered over digital media. No longer does a customer just buy a paper book. The same content can be presented and delivered in potentially hundreds of different formats either as a complete piece or in small chunks. If you are going to attempt to manage and track this explosion of varying formats your little word document and spreadsheet collection will quickly start to look a little pedestrian if not woefully inadequate.
Consider, ONIX 3.0 has just been released and will start to be widely adopted next year. It is no coincidence that it is the first version of the standard that is not backwardly compatible with previous versions and that one of its primary focuses is dealing with digital media. So the problem of managing complex data and tracking your products in their myriad new forms is just going to get worse!
And the answer… a good solid database. A database will force you categorise and sort your title information and the very act of breaking down the information will lend the database to producing ONIX messages. Indeed most title management systems these days offer ONIX support as standard.
Of course just purchasing a database is not the whole answer. The biggest, generally the most expensive, element of such an endeavour is your time. Every minute spent sorting your title information ready for loading into a database is time lost not producing/selling books and initially your instincts will be to postpone that task. However, if you do see it through not only will you massively improve the chances of selling more of your work you will gain efficiencies in your internal work flows (you’ll only ever have to key things once and there will only ever be one version of the truth) thereby saving money, you will also potentially be able to automate tasks such as catalogue production, AI production, automated reports and updating your web sites. All because you have a central database that can drive the data that drives your business.
It is just unfortunate that in these hard financial times that the old adage “you have to spend money to make money” is as true as ever.
Tags: Onix