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Automatic for the people

15.05.08 Rob Jones

It is probably safe to say that few people have gone into publishing for their love of computers and IT. Throw a phrase like “rich metadata”  into conversation at industry events and you can just see publishers’ eyes glaze over. Computer acronyms such as Onix and XML will have them running to the bar.

Yet the time-saving benefits of Onix in particular can be crucial to a publisher’s business. Publishers often engage with questions of finance, yet many of us aren’t so objective when it comes to time. We let repetitive tasks continue to drain useful hours out of each week rather than putting in a concentrated burst of effort to automate the job.

Of course, just because automating makes sense doesn’t mean it’s easy. For a start, someone has to first work out which tasks are good candidates for automation. Then there’s the problem that automation tends to require IT skills. Finally, there’s the catch-22 of being over-stretched, particularly for smaller publishers; many of us haven’t got a few days to devote to an automation project, no matter how much time will be saved in the end.

An electronic questionnaire

Most publishers are probably already aware of Onix (Online Information Exchange), the industry initiative aimed at helping organisations share electronic information about books to wholesalers, e-tailers and anyone else involved in the sale of books.

You could think of Onix as a kind of giant electronic questionnaire, with spaces for filling in nearly every conceivable detail about a title. Not every question is always relevant, so a book’s Onix data may have lots of blank areas. But the idea is that every piece of information has its appointed place—which takes the headache out of disseminating book details. The completed questionnaire is boiled down into an Onix “message”, with all the gaps removed, so that it can be conveniently emailed to those who need a copy.

Inside one of these “messages” will be text similar to this:
<Price>
  <PriceAmount>7.99</PriceAmount>
  <CurrencyCode>GBP</
CurrencyCode>
</Price>

The clarity this affords is paramount; on its own, “7.99” could be a spine width—you wouldn’t know for sure. But here we can see it’s within categories labelled both “Price” and “PriceAmount”. If you know the Onix standard then you can read the excerpt as stating that the price of the title is £7.99.

While the layout is a bit tricky, though not im­possible, for a person to read, it’s well suited for processing by computer. By standardising the way the information is laid out, Waterstone’s, Gardner’s, Amazon, Nielsen and ­others can all use the same Onix message to update their records.

Of course, no one wants to actually write one of these messages by hand, so there are various computer programmes available with helpfully annotated forms to fill in, which then take care of organising and labelling all that information for you. Larger publishers may already hold all that data in their systems; it’s just a matter of reshuffling it into the Onix
format.

Inhouse benefits

Sending out book data to retailers as Onix messages brings a lot of ­benefits, but you can also use Onix to save time inhouse.

If creating an Onix message is like filling in a questionnaire, with a little bit of IT wizardry the process can be made to run the other way. Initially, you fill in the blanks to
create an Onix message, and then use the Onix message to fill in blanks elsewhere. Book catalogues can be created by using your store of Onix messages to automatically supply all the descriptions, quotes and publication details.

Alternatively, a design template for a company website can be created, and then Onix messages fed in to provide the content.

To give one example, when Snowbooks updates its Onix data—for example by adding a new title—it gets three other updates “for free”. The revised Onix information automatically updates the website and the print files for the AIs and the paper catalogue. A process that used to take days now takes seconds.

The logic holds even if you’re not enthused about the idea of automation. As Onix messages percolate through the industry and gradually become a requirement, the chore of producing them may fall to us ­whether we like it or not. We may as well turn the time we spend into an investment and make it pay for itself.

feature Onix Rob Jones

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