Understanding Critical Elements of E-books, Part Two: Find That E-book – or Not: How Metadata Matters

Introduction

Metadata: Without You I'm Nothing (Metadata Quality and its Importance in E-Book Discovery)

E-books are invisible products. You'll never see one on the street, in the park, on the subway, in a store. E-book devices don't display cover images—digital reading is quite private. So how do readers find out about e-books? Without metadata, there's no indication that the e-book exists. And e-book trading partners have strange new requirements that print vendors don't have. In this talk, Laura Dawson discusses how to make e-books visible.

Laura Dawson specializes in the technology behind books. She has worked at Doubleday, Muze, Barnes & Noble.com, SirsiDynix, and as an independent consultant whose clients have included the Book Industry Study Group, Audible, McGraw-Hill, Chuckwalla, Adobe, Loyola Press, Cengage and Scholastic. She is now Communications Chief at Firebrand Technologies, helping publishers organize and distribute their metadata and e-book titles.

Pointing Readers to the Correct Book: ISTC, ISBN and E-book Assignment

The number of formats for a book has been increasing as more and more platforms make the same content available for sale.  Pat Payton will cover when a work should have a new ISBN and how the ISTC can help collocate formats for searchers.

Patricia Payton, Senior Director of Publisher Relations and Content Development for Bowker, is responsible communicating metadata requirements and best practices to publishers of all sizes. Patricia has experience retail bookstores as well as international markets. She also holds a Master’s degree in Library Information Science specializing in Digital Libraries as well as an MBA. She actively contributes to industry committees for BISG and the AAP. You can find her on twitter @DiscoverBowker.

ONIX for E-books

ONIX, which stands for Online Information Exchange, is an XML-based standard created by a consortium of publishers, wholesalers, retailers, and data aggregators, created in response to the publishing industry’s need to be able to communicate better information about titles. Bell will describe the latest version of ONIX, ONIX 3.0, its purpose and application in the e-book supply chain, and also touch on how libraries could potentially use ONIX data in support of MARC cataloging and discovery of e-books.

Graham Bell is focused on the continuing development and application of ONIX for Books, and on other EDItEUR standards for both the book and serials sectors. He joined EDItEUR in 2010. Graham previously worked for HarperCollins Publishers in the UK where most recently he was Head of Publishing Systems. He led the development of bibliographic and digital asset management systems, and was involved with the launches of many recent HarperCollins digital initiatives including e-audio, e-books and print-on-demand programmes. He has over a decade of experience with ONIX for Books. Prior to HarperCollins, he worked as an editor and in IT roles within the magazine industry with Redwood Publishing.