ONIX Will Help You to Sell More Books<

Article by Steve Carlson
As a publisher, you've heard about ONIX—the XML database format for information about your book titles. If you're like many small publishers, you may be hoping it will go away. After all, this is technical stuff, and we publishers want to spend our time creating and selling books.

But inore it at your peril. In the not-distant future, most trade sales will become impossible without ONIX submissions. And even now, publishers not yet making use of ONIX are at a competitive disadvantage.

Even for publishers who have come out with only one or two titles so far, it's mistake to ignore ONIX. Those of us who have been publishing for many years remember similar resistance to other new technologies. Back mid 1980s, for example, I often heard small publishers say they simply won't put those ugly bar codes on their books. Most of those publishers are now in other lines of business.

The comparison with bar codes is an apt one. By the late '80s, publishers found that bar codes actually helped to sell their books, and that books without bar codes were increasingly hard to sell. What's more, they could use bar codes without becoming techno-nerds. They could hire a service to create their bar codes, or they could buy user-friendly software to create the codes themselves.

Similarly, ONIX will not require extra work—it will reduce your workload. It is designed by the book industry to help you sell books, and ignoring it will put you at a competitive disadvantage with the publishers who are using it. And fortunately, like bar codes, ONIX submissions can be easy and cheap.

What is ONIX?

Here's a short primer on the subject.

ONIX stands for Online Information Exchange. It is a very specific format for an XML database, designed by an international group of book-industry organizations, represented in the US by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG).

The ONIX standard is designed to accommodate every bit of information about your book that you might want to share with your trading partners and/or the reading public. Of course, it has to include basics such as the ISBN, author, binding, pub date, number of pages, and price. But from there, you can add everything else that you’d like to share with the wholesalers, Web sites, bookstores, librarians, and potential buyers to know. For example, you can include detailed descriptions, cover images, reviews, table of contents, and sample chapters.

 How Do You Benefit?

Getting this information out, and readily accessible to everybody, is basic to book promotion. The more wholesalers, chain stores, indies, Web stores, and other resellers know about your book, the easier it is for them to sell it. The more an end consumer knows about your book (from a Web listing or a bookstore database, for example), the more likely he or she will be to buy it. With something like 300,000 new titles coming out each year, any book for which the information is not readily accessible is going to be ignored.

In the past, all this information was distributed on paper. There were book catalogs, flyers, promotional mailings, and lots of other items mailed out to spread word about new books. Of course, we still send out such items to try to catch the attention of booksellers, librarians, and others. But those are now just attention grabbers—nobody files them away to refer to later. When they want the information, they look it up in databases. 

Without standardization, this would be a nightmare for publishers. It’s just not practical to develop one set of data about your book titles for Ingram, another for Barnes & Noble, another for Amazon, another for Bowker, and another for the Library of Congress, for example. 

That’s why ONIX was developed. Put together one database, in ONIX format, and submit it to every organization that needs it. They don’t all want exactly the same information—but everything is there, and because of the standard format, their computers can easily find the information they want. If you include lots of material, then they’ll have lots of information about your books. If not, they won’t. (Note: ONIX data is submitted individually to each trading partner, so it can be modified to meet the specific requirements of any trading partner, but in most cases, the same data can be used for each "recipient.")

As a side benefit, once you have the data, you’ll find a lot of your own uses for it. You can use it to keep your own Web site up to date, for example, or your book catalog. No more entering the same information over and over again in different places.

How to Create an ONIX Database

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a technical genius to create a database. There are services that will do it for you. Unfortunately, most are very expensive. Or, you can do it yourself with a piece of software that lets you fill in all the information in user-friendly fields, and all the coding is done behind the scenes, to be submitted individually to each of your trading partners. That software is Couplet.

If you use Publishers' Assistant software, Couplet is integrated with all other features of the software, so there's never a need to put in title information more than once for any use. For those who don't use Publishers' Assistant, Couplet is available separately for just $99. To the best of our knowledge, there is no easier or lower-cost way to comply with—and take advantage of—the new standards.

As always, we encourage you to compare our products with others. For a complete and constantly updated listing of all other options and services—as well as huge amounts of additional information about ONIX, go to the BISG site at www.bisg.org/onix . This site contains all the information (including links to other sites) that you might want to have about ONIX.

For more information about Couplet, use the links below. For any questions, feel free to contact our sales office at 1-800-310-8320 or info@upperaccess.com. If you have any technical questions or inquiries about specific features, the best information will come from the user help office, PAHelp@pubassist.com or our help phone at 1-800-310-8716.

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