Part 2 of a three-part workshop developed and presented by Laura Dawson and Brian O'Leary at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 11, 2012

1. Making metadata effective
Tools Of Change For Publishing, Frankfurt, October 11, 2012

2. Overview of this section
✤ Ensuring product discovery
✤ Managing metadata for physical and digital products
✤ Managing metadata across global markets
✤ Clearly communicating rights

3. Ensuring product discovery

4. Four different types of metadata
Bibliographic Commercial Transactional Merchandising
Consumers
Publishers
Basic book Tax codes Inventory Descriptive
information content
Proprietary Location
Classic fields Marketing
Order and
understanding copy
billing
of metadata
Consumer-
Royalty and
generated
accounting
content

5. Many different sources
✤ Publisher-prepared files
✤ Publisher requests (typically e-mail)
✤ Data aggregators (e.g., Bowker, Ingram, Baker & Taylor, BookNet
Canada, Nielsen)
✤ Social reading sites
✤ Retailers (online and offline)

6. Keys to product discovery: today
✤ ISBNs (Google actively looks for & prioritizes these)
✤ BISAC categories and Amazon keywords
✤ SEO your descriptions (test in Google Adwords)
✤ Update metadata as products move through their life-cycles

7. Physical, digital and metadata

8. Why do workflows matter?
✤ Price changes and collapsing cycle times
✤ Significant manual intervention
✤ Errors, rework and duplication
✤ Comparative works (consumer benefit)
✤ Growing downstream product complexity

9. Complicating digital metadata
✤ Differential timing (physical 6 months prior, digital upon publication)
✤ (Some) different attributes
✤ More frequent price changes
✤ Conversions are often outsourced
✤ In relative terms, a new process

10. Current metadata practices
✤ Created in four primary departments (editorial/ME, marketing,
production and creative services)
✤ Management responsibility varies by sender
✤ Most publishers treat publication as the “end date” for updates
(changing somewhat)
✤ “Complete” is not “accurate”; inspection limited
✤ Preparing eBook metadata somewhat “ad hoc”

11. Metadata as a functional map
Acquisition/ Editorial Production/ Marketing
P&L Design
• Assign • Assign • Create • Create
ISBNs to BISAC cover image market-
tradable categories • Assign page specific
products • Create initial counts product
• Assign title/ product • Assign descriptions
author/price descriptions format types • Aggregate
advance
reviews
• Confirm pub
date
Metadata repository

12. Best practice:
organizing metadata
✤ “Single source of truth”
✤ Multiple contributors
✤ Multiple recipients
✤ Designated/defined roles
✤ Real-time updates

13. Managing
across global
markets

14. Territorial advantages
✤ Additional income while managing cost, risk
✤ Tap into local market knowledge
✤ Meet demand in other markets
✤ Extend the life of certain titles

15. 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

16. Digital markets are evolving
✤ U.S., U.K. are the primary digital markets; Brazil growing
✤ Slowing rate of digital growth in the U.S.
✤ Digital demand now moving to fixed-price markets
✤ Stronger growth expected in markets like France, Germany, others
✤ Differential VAT rates may play a role

17. Trends affecting product metadata
✤ Acquisition (print and digital together)
✤ Licensing and pricing (common for print and digital)
✤ Marketing - a mix of local art and science
✤ Rights and royalties
✤ Production and operations
✤ User-generated metadata increasingly important (reviews, lists, etc.)

18. So what does this mean?
✤ Digital is breaking out in lots of places, but not all at once
✤ Increased visibility = transparency on availability, price awareness
✤ Inconsistent print and digital metadata is visible and may hurt sales
✤ Digital is putting pressure on traditional models for territorial rights

19. Clearly communicating rights

20. Communicating rights clearly
Contracts With author and agent
With distributors
With retailers
Feeds “Available for sale”
“Not available for sale”
Price (tax inclusive, tax exclusive)
Limitations (may vary by markets)

21. Problems with rights descriptions
✤ Contracts typically start as documents, not databases
✤ There is no “standard” application
✤ Worldwide (or worldwide “excluding ...”)
✤ Specific markets
✤ Specific languages
✤ Usage and exceptions
✤ “Handshake” agreements: formats required vary by recipient
✤ No one has a full, easily accessible view of rights

22. Moving forward ...
✤ Digitize contracts: obtain rights information from a database, not an
interpretation
✤ Push for more standard, widely used definitions, working with
IFRRO, Editeur (ONIX 3.0), BISG, ISO
✤ Internal to your organization: “Rights Central”, a core part of a
publisher’s added value
✤ While you are doing this: talk to your supply-chain partners

23. “Making metadata effective”
✤ Metadata is the key to online and digital product discovery
✤ Metadata should be harmonized for comparable products (physical
and digital)
✤ Metadata is visible everywhere; plan accordingly
✤ Rights (a digital mess) need near-term care and feeding