Transcript No Slide Title

Standards for the Digital Age
Brian Green
EDItEUR / International ISBN Agency
Moscow, September 2008
What is EDItEUR?
• The international body for book industry standards
• 90 members from 20 countries (most EU countries,
Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, Russia, USA etc.)
• Develops and maintains major book trade
standards for product information, EDI etc.
• Acts as a co-ordinating “umbrella” for national
standards bodies
• Members include publishers, distributors,
wholesalers, booksellers, subscription agents,
libraries, systems vendors
EDItEUR standards
• ONIX product information standards
• ONIX for licensing terms
• EDIFACT EDI formats
• EDItX XML-based trading message formats
• Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
EDItEUR also manages the International ISBN
Agency and represents the book industry at
international standards bodies (ISO, GS1 etc)
Why do we need standards ?
• In one word – “INTEROPERABILITY”
• In a digital environment, where computer to
computer communications are dominant,
information needs to be transmitted between
systems without the need for human intervention
• Without standards we are either tied to trading
partners or have to implement multiple formats
• Standards enable us to trade more easily and
effectively with many partners, all using the same
interoperable communication formats
Whose standards?
• Proprietary standards (e.g. Microsoft, Adobe,
Mobipocket )
– Not always a bad thing as long as they are open (e.g.
Kodak, PDF) but they usually provide advantage for te
originator
• International ISO standards (e.g. ISBN, ISSN) and
official national equivalent (GOST, ANSI etc)
– Widely accepted so low risk of implementation
– Lengthy process and lack of flexibility not always
appropriate to required time-scales.
– National standards limited and parochial
Whose standards?
• Internet standards (e.g. W3C, IETF)
– Enable Internet. Include mark-up languages (e.g.
HTML) stylesheets (e.g..CSS) etc.
• Trade standards (e.g. EDItEUR, NISO)
– Developed on the basis of specific industry
requirements though open consensus procedure
– Sometimes an annotated subset of official standards
(e.g. EDIFACT, X12, RFID). Sometimes completely
new (e.g. ONIX)
– Fast, flexible and controlled by and for our industry
Standards for the book trade
• ISBN started as an industry standard in UK 1968,
became international (ISO 2108) in 1970. Now
used in 174 countries
– EAN13 article identifier not established until 1977
• ISBN in barcodes in 1980
• Book trade EDI using national standards (BISAC
and X12 in US, Tradacoms in UK) in 1980s
• EDItEUR international EDIFACT EDI 1992
• ONIX for rich information about books 2000. Now
used in 14 countries
New book trade standards
• ONIX for Licensing Terms / ACAP for expressing
usage rights
• International Standard Text Code (ISTC) for
identifying underlying works
• International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) for
identifying authors and other contributors
• Radio Frequency Identifiers (RFID) implementation
for books
• .epub standard for e-book text format
The need for standards: e-books
• File formats
– proprietary devices and formats try to tie users to one
channel
– Users don’t want to be locked in (look at what has
happened in the digital music industry)
– .epub format becoming normal “generic” format output
by publishers which is then converted to other formats
– Sony Reader has announced support for .epub format
but will publishers sell unprotected .epub versions?
The need for standards: e-books
• Identification
– ISBN Standard (ISO 2108: 2005): “Each different format
of an electronic publication (e.g. “.lit” ,“.pdf”, “.html”, “.pdb”)
that is published and made separately available shall be
given a separate ISBN”
– Some US publishers only assign one ISBN for all ebook formats
– This makes it difficult for users and libraries to know
which formats are available as most book databases
rely on ISBN for discovery and ordering
– ISBN, EDItEUR and other book trade standards bodies
recommend separate ISBNs for each format
Managing multiple formats with ISTC
• New ISO International Standard Text Code (ISTC)
identifies the underlying work
• One ISTC can link to many manifestations of a work
• Publishers and booksellers will use ISTC to link all
the different e-book and other formats
• International ISTC Registration Authority is now set
up and will start to issue numbers next month
• Applications have been invited from potential
national registration agencies
Product information standards
• ONIX for Books: the international standard for
communicating rich information about books.
– Comprehensive bibliographic detail
– Text: descriptions, reviews, author info, extracts
– Images: jackets, thumbnails, author photos
– Audio and video, website links
– Territorial rights
– Prices and availability in different markets
– Promotional campaign information
– Helps to sell more books
ONIX being enhanced for e-books
• ONIX was originally designed for physical books
and supply chain,
• ONIX for Books version 3.0 now under development
to provide a better platform for digital publications
and remove redundant elements from old releases
• Input from 14 user countries, including active
participation from Russia
• Discussions taking place at the moment
• Release planned for Late October/early November
2008
Communicating Licensing Terms
• ONIX for Publications Licence (ONIX-PL) standard
expresses any publisher-library licence in XML for
linking from e-journal or e-book
• User of e-content can see user-friendly lists of what
they may and may not do with the e-content
• The Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP)
project is using ONIX licensing term semantics to
express permissions for use of web content, in the
form of tags that can be interpreted by search
engine crawlers
EDI standards development
• EDItEUR EDIFACT EDI message formats,
developed 15 years ago, still working well but
technology has now advanced
• EDItEUR has developed a new generation of EDI
standards. EDItX XML EDI formats
• In addition to normal commercial messages, EDItX
includes a Digital Sales Report message for
distributors to inform publishers of e-book sales
• Because they are based on XML, EDItX also
enables the development of standard web services,
the Web 2.0 solution for commercial transactions
Identifying authors/contributors
• How to uniquely identify authors?
– Many authors have the same name
– Sometimes the same author uses different names
– In different alphabets/character sets (e.g.roman/cyrillic)
there can be alternative ways of spelling the same name
• A new ISO standard in development, the International
Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) will provide a unique
identifier for authors and other contributors
• Due to be published in 2009
Radio Frequency ID (RFID)
• An RFID chip in a book can uniquely identify that
copy of a book without the need to have “line of sight”
– (e.g. the total contents of a box can be read without
opening it. Books on a shelf can be scanned and listed
without removing them)
• Currently, the chips are being inserted by distributors
or bookshops and not by publishers
• We need a standard that includes ISBN and serial
number but also identifies the company that inserted
the chip, so as to avoid duplication of serial number
• EDItEUR, International ISBN Agency and GS1 have
formed a joint working party to develop a standard
Summary
• There are many international standards already in
place to facilitate trading in a digital environment
• Existing standards are being upgraded to take into
account new digital products and supply chains
• All publishers, distributors, wholesalers, booksellers,
librarians and their systems suppliers should keep
informed of standards developments and participate if
possible.
• EDItEUR is happy to collaborate with the Russian
book trade, which is already actively represented on
the ONIX International Steering Committee
Useful URLS
• EDItEUR
– www.editeur.org
• International ISBN Agency
– www.isbn-international.org
• ISO TC46 SC9
– www.niso.org/international/tc46
• ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocoll
– www.theacap.org
Brian Green [email protected]