ONIX - and Overview

For a full overview of ONIX please see http://publishers.asn.au/index.cfm?doc_id=215 or http://www.editeur.org/

ONIX stands for Online Information eXchange. It refers to a standard format that businesses can use to distribute electronic information about books to trading partners, e-tail and retail booksellers, other publishers, and anyone else involved in the sale of books.

Why was ONIX Created?

It's a proven fact that the more information customers have about a book, the more likely they are to buy it. In the bricks and mortar world, the jacket cover of a book contains much of the promotional information about that book: cover design, synopsis, reviews, author biography, etc. All of this information (also known as book metadata) draws the potential reader into a book and helps to sell it.

The Internet has grown as a popular place to buy books. Online, however, there is no physical book to pick up and peruse. What has replaced it is a web page devoted to the book that can be designed to carry all the rich information of the jacket cover, and more, such as audio and video files pertaining to the book. And again, the richer the data, the better the chances are for selling the book.

However, getting that data about each book from publishers to booksellers has been a challenge, complicated by the fact that each major industry database company (such as Ingram, Bowker, and Amazon) has had a different format preference for receiving the data. This lack of a standard made it difficult and time-consuming for publishers to format and exchange their book information.

Bookmine is fully ONIX complaint which means you can output your records in ONIX XML mode or import (this depends on the version of Bookmine you are licensed to use)