ONIX for Books

ONIX for Books is an XML format for sharing bibliographic data pertaining to both traditional books and eBooks. It is the oldest of the three standards, and is widely implemented in the book trade in North America, Europe and increasingly in the Asia-Pacific region. It allows book and ebook publishers to create and manage a corpus of rich metadata about their products, and to exchange it with their customers (distributors and retailers) in a coherent, unambiguous, and largely automated manner.

The ONIX for Books standard provides a free-to-use format for passing descriptive metadata about books between publishers, data aggregators, book retailers and other interested parties in the publishing industry. Metadata concerning one or more book titles can be stored in a suitably formatted XML file known as an 'ONIX message' ready for dissemination. Whereas other data standards exist for storing the contents of a book - the text, layout and graphics - the ONIX for Books standard holds information about the book, similar to, but more extensive than, the information one would typically find on the cover or title page of a printed book or in a library catalog. The ONIX for Books standard provides a way to communicate information about a book's author, publisher, price, publication date, physical dimensions, synopsis and many other details besides. The standard is quite extensive and most publishers currently provide only a few dozen of the many hundreds of pieces of information that the standard is designed to carry.

The organisations responsible for creating the ONIX for Books standard were:

aided by:

The standard is now maintained and developed for global use by EDItEUR, with guidance from an international steering committee representing the book trade in countries where ONIX is used.

ONIX for Books Release 1.0 was published in 2000. Revisions were made in releases 1.1, 1.2 and 1.2.1.

Release 2.0 was issued in 2001. A backwards-compatible version, Release 2.1, arrived in June 2003. Three minor revisions intended for general use have been made since then, the most recent in January 2006. A further revision intended solely for use in Japan was issued in 2010.

Release 3.0 was published in April 2009, and the first minor revision (labelled 3.0.1) was issued in January 2012. A second minor revision (3.0.2) was published in January 2014. The latest version is 3.0.3, released in May 2016. This release has not yet completely replaced 2.1, though implementation of 3.0 is becoming more widespread (particularly outside the English-language publishing markets). There is also an Acknowledgement message format (published 2015) which recipients of ONIX data files may send to confirm receipt of ONIX messages.

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