The ability to describe products completely and accurately and to efficiently share that data with trading partners and consumers is essential for e-commerce in every industry. In this respect book metadata is unexceptional. But every product and every industry has unique aspects that its product metadata attempts to reflect.
It’s possible to sell a book online with just a few pieces of information, such as ISBN, title, and price. But providing minimal metadata limits opportunities for a book to be discovered, create a buzz, or make a sale. Success in the virtual marketplace requires the distribution of book metadata that fully supports findability and discovery, provides information that engages the potential reader, and contains all the information needed to support business transactions and business intelligence. Metadata must also meet the needs of booksellers and other trading partners. Many major receivers of publisher metadata require that certain metadata elements are present and correctly formatted and may reject metadata that fails to meet standards, resulting in lost sales.
For digital books, metadata entirely takes the place of all the physical organization, display, and browsing opportunities possible in bricks-and-mortar stores. For readers who prefer to buy books online, this is true for physical books as well.
Metadata that is thoughtfully created and shared using industry standards and best practices supports all aspects of publishing and bookselling. And when creating, controlling, and monitoring book metadata is fully integrated into each publication stage, the result is a powerful asset for effective selling across traditional and evolving sales channels as well as for the collection and analysis of sales results and market trends.
