20170425 Managing an extended value chainpublishersforum.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/... · 4/25/2017 · About EDItEUR • a not-for-profit membership organisation • develops,

Managing an extended value chain

The central role

of standards and metadata

Graham Bell

EDItEUR

Publishers’ Forum, Berlin25th April 2017

About me

• 20+ years experience at the point where

publishing and technology meet

• formerly senior manager in IT department for

HarperCollins UK

• led development of bibliographic, editorial and

digital asset management systems, involved in e-

book, e-audio, print-on-demand and online projects

• joined EDItEUR in mid-2010, primarily

responsible for ONIX development; executive

director from 2014

About EDItEUR

• a not-for-profit membership organisation

• develops, supports and promotes metadata and

identification standards for the global book, e-

book and serials supply chains

• acknowledged centre of expertise on standards

and metadata for the industry

• based in London, but a global membership of

publishers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers,

subscription agents, libraries, system vendors,

rights organizations and trade associations

About EDItEUR

• also provides management services to ISBN,

ISNI International Agencies, IDF and LCC

• EDItEUR has four full-time staff, 1.4 FTE part-

time staff, plus access to world-class consultants

in both book and serials sectors

• we work closely with other standards bodies, to

ensure our standards meet the needs of their

stakeholders too

• member participation is vital, to ensure that

standards keep pace with evolving business

requirements

EDItEUR members (books)

• growing membership from 24 countries and

across whole of supply chain

• major publishers including Hachette, Bonnier,

HarperCollins, Macmillan, Random House, Wiley

• distribution, metadata and retail companies

including B&N, Waterstones, Ingram, Libri, KNV,

Nielsen, Bowker, BDS, Google, Tolino

• trade organisations including MVB, BIC, BISG,

BNC, CLIL, NTCPDSAC (CN), JPO (JP)

• systems and services vendors including Klopotek,

Ingenta, Virtusales, Firebrand, Arvato

EDItEUR family of standards

• ONIX – descriptive metadata

• ONIX for Books

• ONIX for Subscription Products (Serials)

• Thema – subject classification

• EDItX – transactional messages

• EDItX Sales Reporting etc

• older EDIFACT and ICEDIS EDI messaging

The business challenges *

• increasingly, a global book market

• explosion of catalog size

• with implications for discoverability, costs, and the

need for product differentiation

• most sales happen in the absence of the product

• increasing dominance of platform players

• reduced barriers to entry for authors

• pressure on publishers’ margins

• need to reduce barriers for other retailers

• standardised n-to-n metadata communication

Showing 13–24 of 841,539 results

‘Titles that meet the BIC

Basic standard see average

sales 98% higher than those

that don’t meet the standard.’

http://www.nielsenbookdata.co.uk/controller.php?page=1129

Nielsen - Metadata White Paper Page 4

Here, the average sales across all records with incomplete BIC Basic elements are 1,113 copies per title, with the complete recordsseeing an 98% increase in average sales.

We can further break this down to compare the effect seen for online sales with those seen through physical book shops, which wewill refer to as offline sales. Figure 1.3 shows the change experienced across these two channelsiii.

fig. 1.3 Average sales per ISBN for records with complete or incomplete BIC Basic data and an image in offline and online book retailers

We see here that there is a more marked difference in average sales for offline retailers than online retailers, where we might haveexpected the opposite to be true. The offline retail channel sees sales rising 124% for titles meeting the BIC basic standard, whereasonline retail sales see growth of 48%.

Looking at the effect of supplying this basic level of metadata by genre shows differences in the degree to which average sales areaffected, but in all cases the records with more complete metadata have average sales significantly higher than those withincomplete data. Figure 1.4 shows this across the four broadest genres used in Nielsen BookScan information.

fig. 1.4 Average sales for records with complete or incomplete BIC Basic data across different genres

Fiction titles see the most dramatic improvement in average sales for records with complete BIC Basic data and an image. Recordswith incomplete data have average sales of 1,326 but this grows by 173% for titles with complete BIC Basic data and an image,which have average sales of 3,624. Specialist Non-Fiction titles show the smallest increase but even so see average sales rise by33% for titles with complete data and an image. Trade Non-Fiction average sales per ISBN grow by 97% when all BIC Basicelements are present, and Children’s titles see average sales rise by 52%.

Overall, we can see a clear relationship between the completeness of basic metadata and sales.

3971_Nielsen_Metadata_white_paper_A4:LR 23/01/2012 12:38 Page 4

• based on a study of the top-selling 100,000 ISBNs

in the UK in 2011

www.nielsenbookscan.co.uk/uploads/3971_Nielsen_Metadata_white_paper_A4.pdf

BIC Basic

• not ‘rocket science’ metadata

• ISBN

• title

• product form

• subject code

• imprint or brand

• cover image

• all present vs at least one missing

• timeliness – 16 weeks

• publication date

• UK sales rights

• supplier name

• availability

• GBP retail price

BIC Basic

• not ‘rocket science’ metadata

• ISBN

• title

• product form

• subject code

• imprint or brand

• cover image

• all present vs at least one missing

• timeliness – 16 weeks

• publication date

• UK sales rights

• supplier name

• availability

• GBP retail price











• based on a study of the top-selling 100,000 ISBNs

in the UK in 2015/16











• timely delivery using ONIX correlates with a

further uplift in sales

NOT ONIX COMPLIANT ONIX COMPLIANT ONIX COMPLIANT, AND TIMELY

‘[For online sales, products]

with progressively increasing

amounts of enhanced

metadata see progressively

increasing average sales.’











• beyond the basics, richer descriptive data also

correlates with greater sales

EFFECT OF SUPPLYING ZERO, 1, 2, 3 OR 4 ITEMS OF DESCRIPTIVE DATA (DESCRIPTIONS, REVIEWS, AUTHOR BIO)











• as does the provision of keywords

• US and UK studies show consistent trends

‘Research has proven that the

more information customers

have about a book, the more

likely they are to buy it.’

Publishers Retailers

Data

aggregators

Effective many-to-many

communication of book

metadata is criticalto meet the challenges of

e-commerce and the

explosion of catalogue size

‘In the future, adherence to standards

will not be an option’

Brian O’Leary, Magellan Media Partners

Standards are the engine oilfor co-operation

Commercial effects

• EDItEUR standards are open and free to use

• transparent governance, independent of particular

commercial pressures, and a permissive license

• support the business needs of a wide range of

stakeholders and reduce industry-wide costs

• encourage competition by levelling the playing

field, promoting interoperability, reducing

vendor lock-in, lowering barriers to cooperation

• support choice and change by decoupling

interfaces from applications

Commercial effects

• provide a shared industry lexicon

• contributes to reduction of technical risks

• enables benchmarking against competitors

• promotes service quality, lowers customer service

costs

• accreditation – can generate brand value

• can help broaden customer or supplier base

• easier entry to international trade

Commercial effects





costs




The date on which a retail consumer

may purchase and take possession of a physical product, or the date on which a retail consumer may access and use

a digital product

Commercial effects





costs




The nominal or approximate date on which the

product is made available in the market, used

largely for planning and business process

purposes. Actual availability to the retailer may

be no more than a handful of days prior to (or

after) this date and – in the absence of a sales

embargo – retail fulfillment to consumers may

begin immediately stock is available. For titles

where a sales embargo is in place, stock must

be sequestered by the retailer until the

embargo expires (or one day prior, for mail

order fulfillment)

Commercial effects





costs




EDItEUR

Members

SteeringCommittee

National groups

Industry stakeholders

What is ONIX? (#1)

• ONIX for Books is a standard data format based

on XML, used primarily to represent and

communicate information about book and book-

related products – metadata –between computer

systems in the global book and e-book supply

chain

<Contributor>

<SequenceNumber>1</SequenceNumber>

<ContributorRole>A01</ContributorRole>

<NameIdentifier>

<NameIDType>16</NameIDType>

<IDValue>0000000121479135</IDValue>

</NameIdentifier>

<NamesBeforeKey>Maj</NamesBeforeKey>

<KeyNames>Sjöwall</KeyNames>

<BiographicalNote textformat="05">Maj Sjöwall is a poet. She lives in Sweden. </BiographicalNote>

</Contributor>

3.0

Versions of ONIX

• ONIX 1.0 – released January 2000

• ONIX 2.0 – released July 2001

• v2.1 stable since 2004 (and compatible with 2.0)

• still the most widely deployed in some countries

• ONIX 3.0 – released (effectively) 2010

• reflects significant developments in e-book market,

internationalisation etc, since 2006, but 60%

commonality

• fast-growing number of implementations

• minor updates in 2012, 2014, 2016

ONIX 2.1 vs ONIX 3.0

• two quite different messages

• block-level updates

• digital products

• sets and series

• sales rights

• marketing collateral

• related works

• parallel multi-lingual data

• international markets

• flexibility of business model and pricing

7–10 years

accumulated

experience

improved

specification

extended

schema

support

reply

message

global best

practice

guide

What is ONIX? (#2)

• alternatively…

• a set of entities and their properties that form a

coherent data model suitable for precise and

detailed, automated, data exchange between

parties in the book and e-book supply chain

• generally intended for bulk distribution of dynamic

data, throughout the full lifecycle of the product

• ONIX as an XML message is only one part of this

framework, and the same data could in principle be

exchanged via other types of message or data format

<Contributor>

<SequenceNumber>1</SequenceNumber>

<ContributorRole>A01</ContributorRole>

<NameIdentifier>

<NameIDType>16</NameIDType>

<IDValue>0000000121479135</IDValue>

</NameIdentifier>

<NamesBeforeKey>Maj</NamesBeforeKey>

<KeyNames>Sjöwall</KeyNames>

<BiographicalNote textformat="05">Maj Sjöwall is a poet. She lives in Sweden. </BiographicalNote>

</Contributor>

xml

"Contributor" : [

{ "SequenceNumber" : 1,

"ContributorRole" : [ { "value": "A01" } ],

"NameIdentifier" : [

{ "NameIDType" : "16",

"IDValue" : "0000000121479135" }

],

"NamesBeforeKey" : "Maj",

"KeyNames" : "Sjöwall",

"BiographicalNote" : [

{ "textformat" : "05",

"value" : "Maj Sjöwall is a poet. She

lives in Sweden." }

]

},

json

predicate

subject object

ld

predicate

role A01

from List 17

book

contributor

"Sjöwall, Maj"

isni:0000000121479135

name type 01

from List 18

subject object

ID type 16

from List 44

ld

isbn:9780007232833

ID type 15

from List 5

"Sjöwall, Maj"

"Wahlöö, Per"http://purl.org/vocab/

relationship/lifePartnerOf

"McBain, Ed"

http://purl. org/vocab/ relationship/

influencedBy

"Mankell, Henning"

http://purl. org/vocab/relationship/ influencedBy

http://vocab.org/relationship/.html

• EDItEUR ONIX 3.0 Specification, global

implementation and best practice guidelines,

and various XML tools

• http://www.editeur.org/93/Release-3.0-Downloads/

• EDItEUR ONIX 2.1 Specifications and tools

• important notes on using 2.1 after sunset

• http://www.editeur.org/15/Archived-Previous-Releases/

• codelists are a vital part of the framework

• http://www.editeur.org/14/Code-Lists#code lists

• technical support mailing list

• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ONIX_implement/join

http://www.editeur.org/14/Code-Lists/

• Thema subject scheme 1.2

• note important link to Amazon browse tree (in EU)

• http://www.editeur.org/151/thema (all resources)

• http://editeur.dyndns.org/thema (interactive browser)

• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thema_implement/join

[email protected]

http://www.editeur.org

IDPF and W3C

EPUB 3.0

• e-book content standard developed by IDPF

• the ‘master format’ for most e-book production

systems

• the distribution and consumption format for

most non-Kindle e-books

• the preferred accessible format for print-

impaired readers, superseding DAISY

• EPUB for education (formerly EDUPUB)

• extends beyond books

• eg EPUB in Google Docs

EPUB 3.1

• very conservative update, back-compatible

• tightens up Specification where there was

ambiguity, deprecates some old / unused

features, final version that includes NCX

• extends support for resources outside the book

(eg remote fonts or datasets)

• improves alignment with current versions of

‘open web platform’ (HTML, CSS, SVG etc),

fewer EPUB-specific extensions

EPUB 3.1

• simplifies embedded metadata, prioritises

remote metadata

• introduces Accessibility Specification 1.0

• accessibility information embedded in the e-book

• alignment with requirements of WCAG 2.0 A or AA

• IDPF ratified this version in early January

• …and work continues on EPUB 3 successor

meanwhile…

IDPF combined into W3C

• proposal for combination of IDPF and W3C

outlined at IDPF conference May 2016

• much discussion… for this was an existential

question for the IDPF

• both organisations have done valuable work

• put to IDPF member vote in October 2016

• 88% of members voted in favour of combination

• combination effected late January 2017

• …and work continues on EPUB 3 successor, now

wholly within the W3C

Why?

• EPUB is already entirely dependent on W3C

standards in order to advance (HTML, CSS etc)

• an e-book is ‘a website in a box’, e-book readers are

built on web browser technology

• W3C was independently pursuing a format for ‘a

website in a box’

• duplication of work between EPUB 3 successor and

W3C’s PWP (packaged web publication) – and the

most active contributors worked on both

• combination avoids potentially destructive fork

• resourcing and financial pressures on IDPF

Potential drawbacks

• W3C is perceived as slow (or perhaps rigorous)

• and expensive to engage with

• not focussed primarily on publishing

• risk that publishing industry cedes control of a

standard critical to its future

• mitigation

• continuity – IDPF’s Bill McCoy now W3C staffer

• transitional membership arrangements

• encourage full engagement

Getting involved

• Dave Cramer: ‘standards are set by those who

turn up’

• W3C Publishing Community Group

• tasked with continuing support for EPUB 3.x

• Publishing Business Group

• advising on requirements and prioritisation

• Publishing Working GroupDigital Publishing Interest Group

• tasked with continuing work on EPUB 3 successor

• CSS WG, Annotations WG, ARIA WG…

free

$

$$

Publishing @ W3C

• http://www.w3.org/publishing

• EPUB Summit Brussels, presentation by Liisa

McCloy-Kelley and Ivan Herman http://bit.ly/2opD0j1

• for further details contact

• Publishing@W3C Champion Bill McCoy

<[email protected]>, or Publishing@W3C Technical

Lead Ivan Herman <[email protected]>

did you

know you can

open EPUBs

in Edge?

Documents

20170425 Managing an extended value chainpublishersforum.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/... · 4/25/2017 · About EDItEUR • a not-for-profit membership organisation • develops,