Step By Step Guide for Publishers
If you are a publisher who outsources your distribution and associated functions to a third party organisation, your involvement with e-commerce transactions will always be at second hand. Nevertheless, you can influence the amount of e-commerce your distributor does by supporting trade initiatives such as the Industry Returns Initiative and by supporting distribution practices which encourage and promote e-commerce over conventional more expensive methods of doing business. What is cheaper for your distributor ought to be cheaper for you as the customer. Encouraging distributors to minimise the use of telephone hotlines or reduce customer service intervention in routine business transactions should be reflected in lower costs for you.
However, the publisher's main application of e-commerce is usually in the supply of product information (bibliographic data) to the book trade bibliographic agencies/data aggregators and key trading partners. The method used depends on the workload involved and the number of titles published, but storing and supplying information about your titles in electronic form is crucial to taking control of your own information and getting it into the supply chain as promptly and efficiently as possible. The important elements are:
- Speed of input - new titles MUST get onto the data aggregator's database before publication and ideally at least six months before
- Speed of input of any last minute changes to the metadata (which describe the book) before publication
- Accuracy of the bibliographic data
- Output to as many potential customers as possible
- Rich descriptive information about the books
To achieve all five elements you need to have a good relationship with the bibliographic data aggregators, Nielsen BookData and RR Bowker. You can find out more about them and their services - and formats for the supply of data - by clicking here
Contact Information
When you've digested all the information in this section and you feel that you want to talk to one of the bibliographic data aggregators, their contact details are below:
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