Twelve bucks a title. That’s how much Barnes & Noble has suggested it will charge publishers if they don’t beef up their title information feeds to the nation’s largest bookseller. Over the summer, B&N, having announced its data-streamlining partnership with Bowker, marched 40 of its largest suppliers into its offices and delivered the dreaded ultimatum: by November 1, transmit 11 key data points via Bowker, six months before a pub date, or pay the piper for the service of key-punching that missing data. “I don’t anticipate that we’re going to turn on the switch on that date,” explains Joseph Gonnella, B&N’s VP of Inventory Management and Publisher Relations. “Our impression is that most of the publishers have the ability to get us what we’re looking for six months in advance.”
Supposing Riggio and company make good on their word, they may be collecting a tidy pile of cash. That’s because B&N has made a strong case for transmitting title data via ONIX — short for Online Information Exchange — and to date, only about 25 publishers are distributing ONIX files. Perhaps that explains the air of desperate befuddlement at last month’s full-day seminar on the ONIX standard, sponsored by the Book Industry Study Group and NYU. Much wild scribbling was in evidence when Andrew Porter, Manager of Digital Content for Harcourt’s trade division, told the crowd about his two-year-old ONIX odyssey, which meant consolidating 40 databases around the company, and, despite much progress, remains an ongoing effort. The really unfortunate news? Judging by the audience’s queries, Harcourt may be light years ahead of other major publishers.
Better news is that when finally deployed, ONIX actually works. As a system for transferring descriptive information from publisher to retailer/wholesaler to consumer, ONIX is an expansion of the original BISAC/BASIC code, designed to transmit information needed to sell a title, from author, ISBN, and price to more complex data such as jacket art, author bio, and reviews. And with the release of ONIX Version 2.0, the available information fields have been expanded. The university presses represented at the session were relieved to find that listing a work with multiple editions, multiple volumes, and Greek on one page and English on another was within the standard’s scope.
In his introduction, Fran Toolan of Quality Solutions, a provider of software and services to the publishing industry, noted disappointment that ONIX adoption has moved slowly since Pat Schroeder declared almost three years ago that this was to be an AAP priority. As B&N’s Gonnella tells PT, however: “The structure should be consistent with the ONIX standard, but we’ve made it clear that we’d take things by carrier pigeon.” He also stresses, “We’ve been pleased to see the degree that publishers have embraced ONIX.” As they struggle toward compliance, some publishers have happily farmed out their data headache. Toolan’s company processes ONIX files for about 8 publishers, and one such client is Scholastic, whose databases are currently undergoing a major overhaul with the possible aim of using ONIX in-house. “We’re trying to design our databases so that they can capture the information ONIX needs,” says Neil De Young, Scholastic’s Business Information Manager. “For the most part, everyone recognizes the concept and the need.” Given the challenge of dragging one’s troops into line so that title information is entered uniformly from the moment a book is signed up, one might well ask: Is ONIX worth the effort? “In the long run, I’m not necessarily sure it’s going to save anyone money,” says De Young. “But it’s going to present information the right way, which in theory should make more money.”
