A BIC event held 28th November 2012CILIP Building, London THE MOTION: “Open source is about distributed innovation and will become the dominant way of producing software” “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from man to pig again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”…
Frankfurt 2012 was its usual busy self, large crowds, queues to get into Halle Acht, long but generally productive meetings, announcements, poor hotels and late nights.But over the years it has become something of a habit to go, meet with people we could probably have seen in the UK and have amazingly productive and positive…
It may seem a strange question to ask, but it reared its head at a meeting of our digital supply chain group this week. There’s little doubt that, despite digitisation, extensive licensing of content and the resulting massive increases in digital sales, our industry still hasn’t begun to concentrate on how it can be made…
Most of you will have seen the announcement that Karina Luke will be taking over as Executive Director of BIC in April and will be joining us on 16 February. Karina has been a long-standing friend and supporter of BIC and we are delighted that she is coming on board. She brings with her from…
The news that 34 organisations now hold e4libraries accreditation may not sound much but, in a year when most of the news about libraries has been bad, it has been very encouraging that progress has been made in so many places in cutting costs and improving library users’ experiences. The e4libraries campaign has been based…
The publication of the Book Industry Study Group’s policy statement on the identification of digital products this week is good news for the standards community – and, we hope, for the book trade in general. The document recognises the merit of the arguments put forward by the International ISBN Agency and consistently supported by BIC…
The last six months have seen a sea change in the publishing world’s attitudes to digital products. That’s not to say that e-books and digital delivery have in any way lost their momentum: sales continue to grow; new devices are launched; and new platforms and opportunities go on emerging. But much of the hype has…
BIC spent the better part of a decade working out the detail of the Industry Returns Initiative proposed by KPMG in the late 90s; and with OUP adopting it a month or so ago it has now probably gone about as far as it is going towards a universal UK standard. Although implementation was much…
We have recently completed our first season of training courses: three one-day sessions on Metadata and ONIX, BIC EDI standards, and ONIX and XML, held in collaboration with the Publishing Training Centre. For a first attempt, we are delighted with the results. Two of the courses were sold out, the other nearly so; and the…
We have just announced the planned launch of IBIC for next October. IBIC is the name we have adopted for a new multilingual version of the BIC standard subject categories, on which we have been working for the past few months. Readers of this blog will know how important we believe it is that there…