ONIX for Books

If your subtitle is wrong at one retailer, that is one mistake; if it is wrong at a retailer, in a library catalog, and on Google Books, that is usually not three mistakes but one, in the feed, copied three times. It also explains why correcting it in one store often does not stick, because the next feed writes the old value back over your correction. Nobody acts on the feed directly: traditionally and hybrid published authors normally find out who owns it, which is the publisher's metadata or operations team and sometimes a separate distributor, and send corrections there, while a self-published book's feed is generated by the platform from the fields you filled in on its dashboard. Find the person or team that owns the book's feed so a correction goes to the source that can keep it fixed.

ONIX for Books is the international standard for sending book product information (metadata) between companies in electronic form. It is an XML message format maintained by EDItEUR, a London-based standards body, and it is what publishers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, and data aggregators use to tell each other the title, contributors, ISBN, price, format, subject codes, description, and availability of a product.

The current release is ONIX 3, with 3.1 published in 2023 and minor updates since; the older 2.1 release is deprecated. The standard is free to implement, but an author never touches an ONIX file directly. It moves between systems.

Almost everything a retailer or library sees about your book that did not come from a human typing it in. The publisher's or distributor's ONIX feed is the upstream source for title, subtitle, contributor names and roles, description, BISAC and Thema subject codes, price, publication date, page count, and format across most trade channels. When a listing is wrong in many places at once, the feed is the usual reason.

Find out who owns the feed for your book and ask what it currently says. For a traditionally published book that is the publisher's metadata or operations team, sometimes through a distributor. For a self-published book it is whichever platform or aggregator distributes the title, and the fields you fill in their dashboard become the feed.

When you find an error on a retailer or library record, route the correction upstream to the feed owner instead of asking each retailer separately. Retailers routinely overwrite manual fixes with the next feed. Keep a correction log noting the date, the field, the party you asked, and when the fix appeared downstream.

1. Ask the publisher or distributor who controls the ONIX feed for your title and how often it is sent.
2. Request a plain-language export of the current record for each ISBN (title, subtitle, contributors, description, subject codes, price, date, format).
3. Compare that export with what appears on major retailer and library listings.
4. Log mismatches and send corrections to the feed owner, then re-check the listings after the next feed cycle.

ONIX is a transport format, not a database, a registry, or a place you can look things up. It is not the same as BISAC or Thema, which are subject code lists that travel inside an ONIX record. It is also not the ISBN, although the ISBN is the key field in every ONIX product record. Nobody registers a book with ONIX.