Ten Key Areas of Change Between ONIX 2.1 & 3.0

EDItEUR, the organization responsible for the ONIX standard, maintains extensive documentation on its website. In addition to hosting the core ONIX documentation, they also maintain extensive writings on implementing ONIX. One such document is this list of ten key areas of change between ONIX 2.1 and the latest version of ONIX 3.0. We’ve adapted it below, or you can read it on the EDItEUR site here.

Removal of redundant elements	All elements that were marked as ‘deprecated’ in the latest revision ONIX 2.1 have been deleted, together with other elements that have been made redundant by the introduction of new features in ONIX 3.0.
Description of digital products	The handling of digital products (delivered online or by download rather than on a physical carrier) has been completely re-thought, and has been integrated with the handling of physical products. There is new provision for describing usage permissions or constraints, whether enforced by DRM technology or not. Such permissions and constraints can be specified at ‘product’ level, or they may vary at different price points.
Handling of multiple-item products, series and sets	ONIX 3.0 takes a new approach to the description of series, sets and multiple-item products, which solves some acknowledged problems in earlier releases.
Publishers’ marketing collateral	New data element groups have been introduced to cover the much greater variety of marketing ‘collateral’ that publishers are now making available over the Internet, or that publishers and aggregators are citing in order to support more effective online selling. Collateral material can be geographically targeted at specific markets.
Sales and distribution in international markets	The former Supply Detail, Market Representation and Sales Promotion data element groups have been reorganised into a single major ‘Product Supply’ group to enable the status of a product in different markets to be more clearly and accurately described.
More flexible pricing	Pricing models have become notably more complex since the introduction of ONIX 3.0, and new rental prices and usage constraints based on pricing are supported.
Multilingual metadata	Most textual metadata can be provided in multiple languages ‘in parallel’, within a single record.
Blocked records for more efficient updating	At a more technical level, ONIX 3.0 Product records are ‘blocked’ in a new way which will permit updates to be sent without complete record replacement.
New schema options	The ONIX for Books schema definition is now offered in the ISO standard RNG schema language as well as in W3C DTD and XSD Schema languages.
New acknowledgement message	A simple new message intended to allow recipients of ONIX messages to confirm receipt or to send details of errors back to the original sender.
Implementation and Best Practice Guide	EDItEUR now provides extensive guidance on implementation and best practices, which is intended to act as a global benchmark for implementers, to reduce the variation between different interpretations of the standard in different countries, and to ensure that ONIX 3.0 messages are as interoperable as possible on a global scale.

Interested in making the switch from ONIX 2.1 to 3.0? Refer to our list of resources here and check our blog for more, including this recent post with several compelling reasons why your firm should make the switch.