BIC Blog

IBIC Categories Coming Next Year

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…

Our New Website

As you can see, we have redesigned the BIC web site. We hope you will like it and quickly find your way around it. In fact the overall structure of the site is unchanged, as it seems to be serving its primary purpose well. We would welcome any comments or suggestions.

Another Frankfurt

I’m afraid the blog has been in abeyance too long. The main event – and preoccupation – of the past month or so has been the moving of the BIC office. We are now installed in the CILIP building on the corner of Store Street and Ridgmount Street in the heart of Bloomsbury, and very…

10 lessons from BIC’s New Trends in Publishing Seminar 2016

Attending an event on ‘new trends’ seems apt at this time, just as everyone is ramping up on their Frankfurt preparation. We took away much more than 10 lessons from this jam-packed morning – but thought 10 might just whet your appetite for now. Ruth Jones (Publisher Business Development, Ingram Content Group): Richard Orme (Chief…

September Thoughts

The end of the holiday season is a good time to take stock; and maybe to cast a fresh eye over the book industry scene. For BIC, it means the opportunity to reassess priorities. There are signs that the hype around digital may be dying down. That would be a good thing, provided that the…

Two Recent Publications

This is the time of year when we all try to get things finished – before taking on new tasks after the holidays. In BIC’s case we have been able to conclude two longstanding pieces of work: a best practice guide for recipients of price and availability data; and our guidelines for implementing the new…

Availability: Opening a Can of Worms

Price and availability data: it ought to be such a simple matter, just a question of telling the supply chain that a price has changed or a title has gone out of stock. However, it is anything but – as the P & A working party we set up recently has been finding out. To…