Everyone is talking about Amazon moving to ONIX 3. Are you ready?

The transition from ONIX 2.1 to ONIX 3.0 hasn’t happened quite as anticipated with many US publishers still yet to make the leap! With news that Amazon will no longer take ONIX 2.1 from December 2020,  the need to make this step now is ever more critical.  We have tried to provide a summary below of some notable improvements and benefits of ONIX 3.0 which in essence is simpler to implement, more modular, and more flexible.

By focusing on migrating from 2.1 to 3.0 publishers can evaluate and improve current business processes, improve and enrich their metadata across the board, all of which will improve discoverability and sales. At the same time this provides the opportunity to shed legacy XML data from older versions of ONIX which are no longer compatible.  The major change relates to digital products which with new product codes follow similar formats to physical book metadata in relation to file formats, usage rights, and licensing.

For global publishers best practice guidelines for ONIX 3.0 are largely aligned, which is a huge improvement from 2.1  which varied across regions, countries and organisations causing confusion and inconsistency. The description of complex international distribution and supply arrangements are simpler,  together with the multi-language capabilities - the ability, for example, for one field to contain 3 book descriptions in 3 different languages, provide for simpler clearer metadata for global book sellers and retailers alike.

New features for ‘sets and series’ to allow for block updating thereby reducing the size of data updates saving time and resources.

In summary ONIX 3.0 provides for more information,  more sophisticated metadata, new codelist entries and improved marketing collateral. By not transitioning over publishers are missing business opportunities with new entrants who choose to use only 3.0.

‍Alex Murphy from Stison talks to Supadu about how their tools can import ONIX 2.1 data from older systems and instantly convert into ONIX 3.0 for any number of data aggregators... Read more

Supadu fully integrates with Stison who offer a variety of solutions covering title management, royalties and rights management.

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