Part 1 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. Getting metadata right
Tools Of Change For Publishing, Frankfurt Book Fair, October 11, 2012

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

3. Courtesy Of Tyler Ruse, LibreDigital/R.R. Donnelley

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.

11. We’ve grown accustomed to craftsmanship

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)

14. How do we get ready?

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

17. What might we be missing?

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)

20. “The world has changed.
We have not.”

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

25. Integrated metadata

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

29. Evolutionary metadata

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