An ONIX Glossary of Terms
This glossary is from the ONIX for Books Specification + Best Practice Guide + Codelists posted to EDItEUR’s website at https://www.editeur.org/93/Release-3.0-Downloads/#Best%20practice. Appearing as Appendix A.1 in the Best Practice Guide, we have re-created it here for easy reference and repeat reading.
BookNet Canada has added to this glossary with terminology and contextual information specific to the Canadian market. You will find BookNet Canada entries to this document identified with a BookNet Canada addition or BOOKNET CANADA AMENDMENT tag alongside the heading.
A
A0, A4 etc
See A series paper sizes. A0 is 1m² in area (1189 × 841mm), A1 is half that, A2 is half again and so on. All sizes have width and height in the ratio 1:√2. A4 is 1⁄16m², and 297 × 210mm.
AA
Author’s alterations, corrections made on proofs by the author or publisher. cf printer’s errors or literals, which are errors made by the typesetter.
AAC
Advanced Audio Coding. Improved codec for audio files to reduce file size or download time. Used to compress audio files in the iTunes store, but not unique to Apple. For a given amount of compression, AAC generally sacrifices a little less quality than MP3.
AACR2
Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, second edition, widely used English language library cataloging rules. cf RDA. See also MARC21, the primary format in which library catalog metadata is transmitted (and often stored).
AB
Abandoned, previously planned publication later canceled without ever having been published. cf NYP.
Abridged
Content shortened by removal of text and minimal re-writing, occasionally termed ‘condensed’ (the latter implies a greater degree of re-writing).
Abstract
Short summary of the contents of (for example) an academic paper, article or chapter. Journal publishers often provide free online access to abstracts, while access to the full text remains dependent upon subscription to the journal.
Abstract model
Generalized conceptual model of a real-world system, developed as a guide or aid to understanding the principles of that system. Often expressed as a series of generic entities (‘things’ – books, people, places, dates and so on), the potential relationships between them, and perhaps the events that may change those entities and relationships. See <indecs>, FRBR.
AC
Author’s corrections, see AA.
Accent
See diacritical mark.
Accessibility
A book can be accessible by print-impaired people (eg blind, partially sighted or dyslexic readers, or readers with a physical disability). For print books, special accessible editionsare often required. For e‑books, accessibility is not a special edition or feature, but a best practice for mainstream editions. Accessibility is also a consideration for the remainder of the supply chain, including retailer websites, library catalogs and e-reading devices. See also WCAG.
Accessible edition
Large print, Braille or specially-formatted audiobook (DTB) that can be used by print-impaired people who cannot use a conventional physical book.
Accession number
A unique identifier added to each item acquired by a library or archive, assigned as part of the acquisition process. The accession number is a proprietary item identifier, and two items with the same ISBN (ie two instances of the same manifestation) would have distinct accession numbers.
Acid-free paper
Higher quality paper with low lignin content, and treated so it is chemically neutral (pH 7.0) or slightly alkaline to avoid yellowing and deteriorating as quickly as normal paper. For the maximum longevity, the highest archival-quality paper contains about 2% calcium or magnesium carbonate as a chemical buffer to guard against future development of acid within the paper as it ages.
Acquisition
Beginning of the publishing process – the publisher agrees the contract with the creator and purchases the rights to publish a work.
The process of selecting, ordering, and receiving books and resources for a library or archive. See also accession number.
The purchase of rights to a product, range of products or (often) an entire imprint from one publisher by another. This usually include transfer of any existing stock of the affected products. cf divestment of a product, range or imprint by the selling publisher.
Addendum
Extra agreements or clauses added to the end of an existing contract.
Addition made to a book in a later printing or subsequent edition – for example a list of corrections (corrigenda), appendices or coda added to any section of a book.
Adhesive binding
Typical paperback (‘limp’) book binding using hot-melt adhesive applied to the roughened or notched spine of the book block to hold the pages or signatures and cover together. Also termed ‘Perfect binding’, ‘unsewn binding’.
Adobe RGB
Extended RGB colorspace, allowing a much wider range or gamut of colors on screen than standard sRGB. It is intended to cover – in RGB – almost all of the colors that can be printed using CMYK. See also DCI-P3, color profile.
Adoption
Decision by a school or college, or by a consortium or educational authority, that a specific textbook will be included on a reading list or used to teach a course of study.
Advance
Sum paid by a publisher to an author (or other contributor) prior to publication. Often paid in parts, upon acquisition (agreement of the publishing contract), upon delivery of manuscript, and upon publication. The advance is paid against future royalty earnings, so the author does not receive any further royalty payments from the publisher until the advance has been ‘earned out’ (or ‘recouped’) at the agreed per-copy-sold royalty rate.
See advance copies.
Advance copies
(pl often just Advances), sometimes also known as a review copies: early finished copies of a book, usually arriving before publication and used for publicity purposes, reviews, and occasionally for evaluation (eg for potential adoption – see approval copies) etc. Book proofs (which are bound but usually editorially unfinished) are also sometimes used in the same way.
A format
UK term for a paperback around 178 × 111mm in size, roughly equivalent to a US rack-sized mass-market paperback. See also B format, pocket book.
Agent
See literary agent.
Agency model
Business model based on the idea that a publisher sells to the consumer and is wholly responsible for setting the price. The retailer acts as an intermediary or agent to facilitate the sale and takes a fixed commission from the publisher; cf the more common wholesale or reseller model. Under the agency model, the publisher can directly control the ‘street price’ or Actual selling price of a book, whereas under the reseller model, street prices are usually at the discretion of the retailer – the retailer can even choose to sell the book at a loss to attract footfall – unless the legal framework provides for Fixed rather than Recommended retail prices. Reseller models where retail prices are not fixed thus encourage retailers to compete on price (possibly to the exclusion of other areas such as customer service) and put great pressure on margins. However, agency models are more complex for the publisher, and may be viewed as anti-competitive.
Aggregator
In metadata, an organization that collects metadata from many sources (mostly publishers), and re-distributes a combined feed to other metadata recipients. This service may enable or be provided alongside other services such as identifier registration, maintenance of a national bibliography or Books-in-Print database, retail sales reporting and so on.
AI
Artificial intelligence, machine intelligence – broad term for the application of software to analyse data and make decisions based on that data aimed at achieving some predefined goal. Encompasses natural language processing, knowledge representation, reasoning, machine learning etc. In publishing and metadata, AI techniques might for example be applied to automated entity extraction (recognising names, places, concepts and so on) from the text of a book to create keyword lists or links to other books about the same entities, to sales prediction, or to abstracting and summarization.
See AIS.
A&I
Abstracting and indexing. cf AIS, AI.
Airside edition
Book only for sale in bookshops in the duty-free (or ‘airside’) area of an airport (cf ‘groundside’). Occasionally, special editions are produced specifically for airside retail outlets (though they are not editions in the proper sense used for P.9 Edition). At other times, airside retail outlets may sell products normally limited to export.
AIS
Advance Information Sheet, colloquially just ‘AI’, also called a Title sheet, a printed page of metadata about a book produced in advance of publication for sales and marketing purposes, including details of the title, author, ISBN, pub date, format, price, a description of the contents and marketing information. In effect, an ONIX Product record can be the digital equivalent of an AIS or title sheet.
Ampersand
The & character, meaning ‘and’ when used in text (typographically, it is related to the Latin ‘et’). In XML data, it must be replaced by ‘&’.
Answer code
Distributor or wholesaler’s brief response to an order or stock enquiry, for example indicating the product is NYP or OP. In ONIX, codes in List 65 (used in the <ProductAvailability> date element) are equivalent to answer codes.
A&P
Advertising and promotion, often the major concern of the marketing department. Not to be confused with P&A, price and availability.
APC
Article processing charge, a fee charged to the author by an open access publisher to cover the cost of editorial work, production and distribution of a work. More common for articles published in open access academic journals, but a similar business model is also used by some publishers for monographs.
API
Application programming interface: a set of protocols, functions or services that one piece of software offers to another, used to share data in ‘real time’ – more or less instantly – between applications on a computer or between computer systems on a network. There are two common styles of network API protocol – SOAP and REST – which differ in the manner they encapsulate data in the request and response messages, and the messages are often passed over HTTP. See also web service.
Approval copy
Finished copies of a book sent to an educational institution or library for evaluation purposes, with a view to purchase or adoption. Approval copies may be sent speculatively or on request, and may be free of charge, or charged if not returned (ie on SOR terms). Also termed an Inspection copy, Desk copy or Evaluation copy.
ARC
Advance Reading Copy, see Advance copies.
AS2, AS3
Applicability Statement 2, 3 etc, IETF specifications covering the secure and reliable communication of business-to-business data on the internet using HTTP and digital signatures for document signing and encryption, with receipt confirmation returned after decryption and signature verification to guarantee successful delivery. Most used for EDI message delivery, but the content could be any standardised structured data (potentially including ONIX messages). AS3 uses the FTP protocol instead of HTTP.
Ascender
Part of lower case letter that lies above the top of the lower case x (ie above the x-heightof the text), in letters such as b or d. cf descender, part of a lower case letter that lies below the baseline of the text, in letters such as g or y. Note that the relative sizes of the ascenders, x-height and descenders varies in different typefaces.
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Simple character set comprising 0–9, A–Z and a–z, plus a few basic symbols and punctuation characters. An ‘Ascii’ text file is one that contains plain text (‘words and spaces’) using only characters from this set. There’s no control over fonts, no formatting or styling (eg different point sizes, justification, bold or italic), and no accented characters, specialized symbols or fancy punctuation – ASCII does not even allow for proper curly quotation marks “ … ” or currency symbols like £ and €. Plain text. cf Latin‑1, Windows‑1252, Unicode.
Ascribed collection BOOKNET CANADA ADDITION
A bibliographic collection to which someone other than the publisher, typically a metadata aggregator, assigns a collective identity. (For example, among the novels of Tony Hillerman, there are several that feature the same protagonists Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. The publisher does not give them a series identity, but in retailer databases they may carry an ascribed identity Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee Series).
See collection.
A series
ISO standard cut sheet paper sizes, used almost everywhere except North America. A0 is 1189 × 841 mm – 1 square metre in area, with sides in the ratio of 1:√2. A1 is half that area (but the same shape), A2 is half again, and so on. 2A0 is twice the area of A0. A4 is 297 × 210 mm (1⁄16th of a square metre). RA and SRA raw paper sizes are roughly 5% or 15% larger in area than A series sizes, to allow for bleed and final trimming, so SRA4 is 320 × 225 mm. B series sheets are intermediate between the A series sizes (B1 is between A0 and A1). These ISO 216 A and B series paper sizes are not used in the USA and Canada, where Letter sized paper is more common than A4 for office use. Letter is 11 × 8½ inches (or about 279 × 216 mm), similar in area but ‘squarer’ in shape than A4. US Legal size is 13½ × 8½ inches (about 343 × 216 mm), significantly taller than A4.
ASIN
Amazon Standard Identification Number, a proprietary identifier for products used internally within Amazon.
ASN
Advance Shipping Notification, message sent by printer, distributor etc, usually via EDI, to confirm imminent dispatch of books to the customer (ie to the distributor, wholesaler or retailer). cf GRN.
ASP
See RRP.
Aspect ratio
Ratio of width to height of an image, screen etc, for example 16:9 for a modern TV screen. See also portrait, landscape.
ASR
Automatic Stock Replenishment, business method whereby new copies of a physical book are automatically manufactured when warehouse stocks fall below a pre-set trigger level – the publisher does not need to generate an order each time. Often combined with short-run printing in a ‘little and often’ stock maintenance process.
Assistive technology
Software and devices such as text-to-speech (TTS) screen readers or Braille displays that make e‑books more accessible to print-impaired readers.
Asterisk
Typographical mark, a small star (‘ * ’), used in text to indicate the presence of an annotation, as a list item marker (instead of a • symbol), to indicate multiplication (instead of the proper × symbol), etc.
Asterism
Typographical mark, usually of three stars or asterisks (‘ ⁂ ’) but often approximated by a row of three spaced asterisks, indicating a break in the flow of text.
Attribute
In XML documents such as an ONIX message, text, numeric or other data contained within an opening markup tag (eg the dateformat attribute within <Date>). XML attributes usually carry information about how to interpret the data content of a data element. More generally, can be synonymous with ‘property’, ‘characteristic’, ‘data element’ or ‘data field’.
Authentication
Verification of the identity of a person (eg via a login), product or process. cf authorization.
Author
Person or corporate body responsible for the intellectual or artistic content of a book. Often specific to the writer of the textual content – a broader and more inclusive term is contributor.
Author’s copies
Free copies of a book given to the author (or other primary contributor) upon publication, as (usually) stipulated in the author’s contract. cf voucher copies.
Authority file
In library cataloging and bibliographic data, a central list of, for example, contributornames. Used to ensure that contributors can be identified unambiguously and to highlight the single preferred form of a name that might have various forms or spellings. Any particular name may appear in different forms on different books, eg with or without Dr., with ü, ue or u, yet the shared contributor number from the authority file would make it clear that the names identify the same contributor. Authority files also help differentiate different contributors who share a name, and optionally can be used to resolve the real people behind pseudonyms. See also ISNI, VIAF. More generally, an authority file forms a type of controlled vocabulary.
Authorization
Verification of the permissions associated with a person or process, for example to access or change some information. cf authentication, on which authorization depends.
AVC
Advanced Video Coding, a format for compressed video data, also termed H.264 or MPEG‑4 part 10. Has superseded earlier and less technically sophisticated video compression schemes such as H.261, H.263, and is likely to be replaced by H.265 (HEVC).
B
B2B
Business-to-business – commercial transactions between businesses, such as between a wholesaler and a retailer, or between a publisher and a wholesaler. cf B2C.
B2C
Business-to-consumer – commercial transactions between a business and an end user (usually but not always an individual consumer). Also termed D2C (direct-to-consumer). cf B2B.
Backlist
Backlist products are those that have been on sale for (typically) a year or more and are still available. In contrast, Frontlist titles are conventionally those