2. Overview of this first section
✤ Where are we today?
✤ What needs to change in the current system?
✤ How do we get ready?
✤ What might we be missing?
✤ Three longer-term metadata trends
4. Where are we?
✤ Labor-intensive
✤ Manual, particularly on the
part of the publisher
✤ Requires downstream
inspection
✤ Inconsistent
✤ Difficult to revise or update
5. Testing metadata dissemination
• Collected metadata changes (single publisher, four-week period)
• Tracked updates at ten retail sites, looking at how quickly the
updates were posted
• Returned to the sites for up to two weeks to see when the new data
was posted
• Picked a cross-section of categories
• Created a database and analyzed the results
6. What we found in this sample set
• Generally consistent results week to week
• Wide variation in the speed of updates
• Wide variation in the share that are ultimately posted
• Certain updates appear to be handled more effectively than others
7. Results by update cycle …
Feed date 2 days 5 days 13 days DNU
June 18 14% 19% 49% 51%
June 25 15% 24% 55% 45%
July 2 8% 20% 52% 48%
July 9 38% 44% 56% 44%
Overall 16% 24% 53% 47%
N= 190; excludes sites that did not carry a given title or do not display certain data categories.
8. Cumulative results by update type
Change 2 days 5 days 13 days DNU
Page count 15% 30% 94% 6%
Price 0% 50% 67% 33%
Subtitle 22% 33% 67% 33%
Description 14% 14% 54% 46%
On sale date 30% 40% 50% 50%
Pub date 13% 27% 40% 60%
Author 16% 16% 22% 78%
Overall 16% 24% 53% 47%
N= 190; excludes sites that did not carry a given title or do not display certain data categories.
9. Cumulative results by site (top 7)
Retailer 2 days 5 days 13 days DNU
R1 53% 84% 84% 16%
R0 26% 53% 68% 32%
R3 6% 6% 65% 35%
R6 6% 6% 59% 41%
R7 6% 6% 56% 44%
R2 17% 17% 50% 50%
R9 0% 0% 33% 67%
Overall 16% 24% 53% 47%
N= 190; excludes sites that did not carry a given title or do not display certain data categories.
10. Cumulative results (bottom 3)
Retailer 2 days 5 days 13 days DNU
R8 25% 25% 25% 75%
R4 8% 15% 15% 85%
R5 0% 0% 0% 100%
Overall 16% 24% 53% 47%
N= 190; excludes sites that did not carry a given title or do not display certain data categories.
12. Caveats, cautions and implications
• A useful exercise, but still a small sample set
• Tells us “what” but not entirely “why”
• Some categories (author name) may reflect style decisions that vary
by site
• Some sites do appear to lag a week
• The sites with few updates probably need to go back to a full feed to
catch up
13. Still, some patterns are clear
• The system as a whole is not built for speed
• Most updates take place in the second week
• It’s a workflow issue, not a case of “try harder”
• The lag creates other problems (over-reacting)
• Could get worse with new entrants (more volume, less
understanding and participation)
15. Process recommendations
✤ Use “book in hand” to gather local feedback
✤ Strengthen sender - recipient feedback loops
✤ Confirm shared definitions for core fields
✤ Articulate when updates occur, what gets updated (and what doesn’t)
✤ Discuss what metadata is changed, added and deleted
16. Future-proofing metadata
✤ Collaborate to automate data workflows and compress cycle times
✤ Prepare for more frequent updates
✤ Harmonize print and digital metadata workflows
✤ Better manage the use of style tags (limit or eliminate)
✤ Engage new supply-chain participants, promoting standards
18. Context rules on the next plateau
✤ Increasingly open, accessible, interoperable
✤ Using context (metadata) to promote discovery
✤ Broader use of published content
✤ Give readers tools that help them manage abundance
19. So, what is the next plateau?
✤ Global (effectively visible everywhere)
✤ Integrated (tied to the products it describes)
✤ Evolutionary (capturing data after the product is released)
21. Global
✤ Online access makes every
book ‘visible’
✤ Many (most?) markets can see
but not buy
✤ Readers forego, feel frustrated
or pursue piracy
✤ Already, some larger publishers
are thinking globally
22. Issues with territorial rights
✤ Time to market
✤ Lost sales, risk of piracy
✤ No consistent communications methods
✤ Competition from similar content
✤ Competition from other, non-book media
✤ A Bookseller survey found that 47% of those responding felt that the
current approach to territorial rights will not hold up
23. Alienating digital customers
✤ Consumers must wait for content to be made available
✤ If all rights are not cleared, certain formats might not be available
✤ The market-by-market sell-in pattern is not widely understood or
supported by readers
✤ Growing interest in “digital first” strategies
24. New or emerging delivery options
✤ DRM-free
✤ Subscription
✤ Component or “short-format” sales
✤ Pay-as-you-go rights
26. The value of integrated metadata
✤ Tied to the products it describes
✤ Already an issue with digital product sales (support issues)
✤ Growing issue with rights sales (requires third-party validation)
✤ Imagine what happens when we try selling components ...
27. Workflow implications
✤ Overlapping metadata (print and digital) with separate approaches to
managing it (problematic)
✤ Metadata for some digital products developed by third parties
✤ “Two-track” approach creates problems for both senders (multiple
workflows, different requirements) and recipients (inconsistencies)
✤ Separate delivery (print, digital) persists, but not separate workflows
✤ Potential opportunity to leverage the use of ONIX 3.0; global view
28. “Show me a good print medium,
and I’ll show you a latency issue.”
Doc Searls, The Intention Economy
30. The buck never stops ...
✤ Increasingly, metadata supports consumer-driven discovery
✤ Recipients contribute much of the metadata added after publication
✤ Examples: awards and prizes; ‘bestseller’ status; endorsements; book
tour data; reading and grade levels (refined); marketing collateral
✤ Survey results: 23 of 39 metadata ‘additions’ were marketing-related
✤ The prevailing focus on getting it ‘right’ at publication must shift to
‘keeping it current’ (and also ‘right’)
31. Taking advantage of opportunities
✤ “Collect everything that’s being said about a book”
✤ Integration with social-media and book-specific platforms
✤ Monitor chatter; use it to inform operational and format decisions
✤ Strengthen tie-ins to temporal events (e.g., movie launch)
✤ Make metadata a vehicle for discovery, not just a description
32. So ...
✤ Global, integrated, evolutionary
✤ Systemic change is probably required
✤ But so are better publishing metadata workflows
✤ There’s plenty to do; let’s keep working on it
Editor's Notes
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This is a bit of what I want to see in the notes\n