When the AAP unfurled its new ONIX guidelines at New York’s McGraw-Hill Auditorium on January 19, you couldn’t fault certain woozy invitees from thinking they’d wandered into a euphoric episode of Oprah. Before their very eyes, R.R. Bowker lay down with Baker & Taylor, Barnesandnoble.com clasped hands with Amazon, Ingram and Vista tearfully embraced, while Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Wiley broke out the peace pipe. All the while, AAP president Pat Schroeder put sufficient “win-win” spin on the affair that it could have passed for an AOL-Time Warner press party. “This thing has legs,” sums up Carol Risher, AAP vice president for copyright and new technology. “There’s no bad news.”
Lord only knows why the usual internecine squabbles took a sudden hiatus for ONIX, short for Online Information Exchange, the AAP’s latest effort to standardize the way that information about books is disseminated online. Of course, it could be the fact that books with “metadata” (online informational tidbits such as cover images, descriptions, reviews, and the like) outsell books without that information eight to one. The theory is that if a customer can’t find a book they’re looking for online, they obviously won’t be buying it.
According to Risher, the whole effort was actually instigated by publishers, who complained to the AAP that they were inundated with requests from online parties seeking promotional and bibliographical data about their books — each request calling for a different format. The AAP thus mobilized what must be an unprecedented coalition of 27 different publishers, online booksellers, distributors, and information services, which whipped up a fully formed industry standard in a shocking eight weeks. Consisting of 148 simple codes, one for each item of information that might be requested about a book, ONIX simplifies the way metadata are coded and exchanged. It’s also a language that can be easily modified. For example, future phases of the program will look at writing XML code for ONIX, which could automate some data-entry and analysis functions.
In some ways, though, the biggest hurdles still lie ahead. That is, publishers will actually have to start using ONIX. Given blasé attitudes toward IT infrastructure and resignation in the face of supply-chain inefficiencies, we may all be reading books on our wristwatches before the standard is fully deployed. But Holtzbrinck has already committed to bringing out its Spring 2000 titles in the ONIX format, having partnered with the software provider Quality Solutions, which means ONIX will be circulating by mid-March. It’s a start, at least. As Risher says, “This is not the end of things here. This is the beginning.”
