ONIX for Books is the international standard for the transmission of product information in the supply chain and has been adopted in some sixteen countries in Europe, North America and elsewhere. BIC promotes ONIX in the UK trade and provides UK input to the development of ONIX internationally.
New release: ONIX 3.0
Published April 2009; revised October 2010
ONIX version 3.0 has now been published, representing a major step forward for the ONIX standard. The new release has been developed to address perceived shortcomings of the previous versions, especially for the description of digital products and publishers' marketing collateral, but also for the handling of multi-volume sets and series and to enable the blocking of records to permit more efficient updating. The new version is not backwards compatible with previous versions and the opportunity has been taken to remove elements which had become deprecated as a result of previous updates and revisions.
To see the full documentation for ONIX 3.0, click here.
Documentation for previous releases of ONIX for Books can be reached here.
BIC Product Metadata Guidelines for ONIX 3.0
November 2010, revised November 2011
The BIC Product Metadata Guidelines are intended primarily to help UK publishers in the preparation of ONIX data feeds, by setting out notes on data element inclusion and usage which have been reviewed and agreed by the BIC Product Metadata Group and in particular by the principal aggregators of UK book trade product information: BDS, Bowker and Nielsen.
The guidelines have been updated in 2011 to bring them more closely into line with international guidelines published by EDItEUR.
ONIX Code Lists
Issue 16 (January 2012)
This includes both new codes for release 2.1 and also code lists applicable to release 3.0.
Using ONIX 3.0 to describe e-books and digital content
June 2011
This set of FAQs has been compiled by Graham Bell of EDItEUR to explain how ONIX (and in particular ONIX 3.0) can be used to describe digital products. ONIX 3.0 has been developed specifically to facilitate the description of data about digital content which has not been fully possible in earlier versions. This document, although it will also be helpful to those needing to describe digital metadata using ONIX 2.1, is designed to encourage the early adoption of the new version and promote the benefits which will flow to the whole supply chain by doing so.
See the revised version (Jan 2013) here.
How to specify markets and suppliers in ONIX 3.0
Click here
An Introduction to ONIX for Books 3.0
This includes a summary of the main changes between versions 2.1 and 3.0
An Introduction to ONIX for Books
A simple guide for new users of ONIX.
ONIX for Publications Licenses
