Publishing industry consultant Joe Esposito crackles with good ideas and his “Metadatarium” is one of them.  Stop and go back to the word and piece it out syllable by syllable until you’re comfy with it. The root word, of course, is metadata, and if you’re not sure what that means you can look it up here.  Got it?

Okay, on with the concept.

It’s a simple one, somewhere between a mega-bookstore and an e-book kiosk.”We need a utopian solution” to the crisis of our disappearing bookstores,” Esposito says. “We need our bookstores, but we also need Amazon’s inventory. We need libraries–and we need a way to pay for them. We need analog tools for discovery and digital modes of delivery. We need a Third Place for community and a Cloud-based infrastructure to deliver all information to anyone anywhere anytime. And I need a place to kill some time on Saturday afternoons.”

Put them all together and you have a metadatarium: a physical location where books are showcased, but then you point and click your mobile device at the book you’re interested in, review the information, then order it for download. We’ve long dreamed of e-book kiosks (see The Day of the Kiosks is Upon Us) and this is one way the idea might be realized.

Esposito sounds serious about launching not just one metadatarium but a chain of, um, metadataria, and it’s hard to detect any irony when he declares “This chain will be funded through an appeal on Kickstarter, managed with the perfection of Apple, and later taken public on NASDAQ, to the benefit of the 401K plans of its shareholders.“  As of today, however, a search on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website, was Metadatariumless. But we’ll keep trying.

One way or another the day of the kiosk will be upon us and it just may look like like Joe Esposito’s brainstorm.

Read it in detail: Joe’s Metadatarium: Creating New Forms of Discovery in the Bricks-and-Mortar World

Richard Curtis

“Despite the widespread impression that e-book people are the jet-setters of the publishing business,” we wrote a while back, “the truth is that just about every step in the creation and publication of e-books is excruciatingly boring. In fact, e-book publishing may be described as long stretches of stupefying tedium punctuated by moments of numbing monotony.”

This observation found support in Andrew Wilkins’s coverage of what sounds like the quintessentially boring event of all time, the world’s first convention on metadata.  For those who are drawing a blank, metadata is all the stuff that goes into an e-book that is not the book itself.  It includes such tedium-inducing items as the ISBN, jacket copy, cover image, publisher information, territorial rights, country codes, suggested retail prices in US and foreign currencies, BISAC code, and a host of other data.

Before you click out of this essay there is one more thing you need to know about metadata: without it the e-book industry would vanish off the face of the earth.  For unless your publisher provides it to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo Apple and other retailers, they will not carry your e-book.

“Good data isn’t just nice to have,” writes Andrew Wilkins of Publishing Perspectives, “these days, there can be serious commercial consequences if your book information isn’t correct.” Wilkins cites a Nielsen executive who notes that “those titles in Nielsen’s top-selling 85,000 with complete data records sold 70% more copies on average than those with incomplete metadata.”

Enough publishing people felt the subject vitally interesting enough to convene a conference about it at last week’s Frankfurt Book Fair. One attendee went so far as to declare “Managing data needs to be a strategic priority.” Maybe it would become one if we called it something else.  Wilkins nailed it when he lamented “Can’t we just choose another more sexy term?”

Now that we have your rapt attention, you can follow up by reading All About BISAC Codes, Mastering the Mysteries of Metadata and Looking for Tedium? E-Books Are Your Medium.

Richard Curtis

Okay, hotshot, so you want to be an e-book publisher? Piece of cake. All you have to do is provide your retailers with the following information about your books:

• eISBN
• Title
• Contributors
• Description
• Publisher
• Language
• Territorial Rights with Country Code
• Suggested Retail Price with country code
• Publication Date
• BISAC Code

Collectively, this information is known as Metadata, and unless you provide it for every title and in a format that is usable by retailers, the stores will not carry your e-books. And every retailer has its own format requirements. But wait, I’m just getting started.

Take the simple matter of book titles. What is your retailer’s policy about designating titles? Does it prefer “The Grapes of Wrath” Or “Grapes of Wrath, The“? And how about the byline? “John Steinbeck”? Or “Steinbeck, John”?

Or take suggested retail price. Which currency are we talking about? US dollars? Canadian dollars? Australian dollars? British Pounds? And do you know the Country Code associated with the currency?

Then there’s the matter of territorial rights. There’s a code for every country in which you have the right to sell your books. Do you know the country code for Lesotho? Cameroon? Mozambique? How about the USA? Canada?

You’ll need a 13-digit eISBN for each and every e-book. Do you have them? Know where to get them? Are they free or do you have to buy them?

And of course you’ll need BISAC codes, the numbered subject headings organized to help retailers display books by topic. Are you publishing a fantasy? What kind of fantasy? Contemporary (FIC009010)? Historical (FIC009030)? Paranormal (FIC009050)? (You can read all about BISAC Codes here.)

What about your covers? What’s the retailers convention for image files, .png or .jpg? What’s the minimum pixels per square inch? Minimum width in pixels?

There’s lots more, pages and pages of definitions, specs and tolerances in fine print provided by each retailer.

Still think any bozo can become an e-publisher? Do your Metadata homework and get back to me.

Richard Curtis