Press Releases

BIC is delighted to announce the launch of its refreshed Product Data Excellence Award (PDEA) Accreditation Scheme.
Metadata underpins our digital age. It drives discoverability and sales, and therefore demands careful attention in terms of its initial creation and ongoing maintenance. BIC’s PDEA scheme currently awards accreditation to more than 50 publishers for the quality of their metadata. The updated and refreshed accreditation scheme is the result of an extensive, in-depth review of BIC’s current scheme, which was last updated in 2010, and encourages further improvements in metadata supply across the industry.

BIC is delighted to announce that the launch of the BIC Metadata Map project will be made at the “Building a Better Business” seminar on Thursday 12th April.
Metadata underpins our digital age. It drives discoverability and book sales but all too often we have little knowledge of just how this vital asset flows through the supply chain to reach customers. To help publishers, retailers and others improve their understanding and target their resources more effectively, BIC has commissioned a 2-year project to map the increasingly dynamic and complex flow of metadata from producer to consumer.
The ‘map’ will be the sum of contributions from collaborating participants in the metadata supply chain and is intended to be published as an updatable online resource for contributing organisations, to show where the metadata goes, what happens to it, who uses it, and how.

Some publishers and other metadata providers are using the subtitle, and sometimes the title fields, in metadata feeds to carry marketing and promotional text. By this we mean using phrases such as ‘Sunday Times Best Seller’, ‘Gripping read from…’, ‘The Richard & Judy Book Club thriller 2017’, ‘”The best thriller writer alive” Another Author’, ‘Man Booker prize winner’ and so on. It is important for discoverability, good customer experience and an efficient data supply chain that these data fields reflect only the true title and subtitle text that appears on the title page. The valuable promotional text should be included in separate and dedicated promotional text fields, and all metadata recipients, including wholesalers and retailers, should be using these fields appropriately.

Book Industry Communication (BIC) the UK book industry’s independent supply chain organisation, announced today that Ruth Jones has been appointed Chair of the BIC Operational Board, taking up the role when current Chair, Mark Majurey, steps down at the beginning of September 2016.
Commercial Director & VP, Digital Publishing at Taylor & Francis Group, Mark Majurey, said: “It has been an honour and privilege to have served as BIC’s Chairman for the past five years. During that time BIC has helped its members continue to manage the physical supply chain as well as meeting the challenges of new digital developments within the industry. I am thrilled that BIC will continue under Ruth Jones’ stewardship as the new Chair and have no doubt it will continue to go from strength to strength.”

The Publishers Green Network will relaunch on Thursday 26 th May with an open meeting followed by a keynote presentation from David Nussbaum, CEO of WWF UK.
The Publishers Green Network aims to help those in the book industry increase sustainability and reduce their overall environmental impact. The PGN looks at the complete process / supply chain for physical and ebooks by providing a networking / information sharing forum to facilitate this. The meeting, from 16.00 – 17.00, is open to any interested parties.

Book Industry Communication (BIC), the book industry’s independent supply chain organisation, announced today that it has launched a new set of industry standard APIs through its BIC Realtime initiative, previously known as BIC web services.
BIC Realtime is a suite of 19 business APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) created for retailers, suppliers and data providers in order to enable immediate data exchange and facilitate instant two-way communications relating to product metadata, ordering, fulfilment, finance and returns.

Book Industry Communication (BIC), the book industry’s independent supply chain organisation, announced today that its suite of training courses, specialising in areas of book production, achieved a 95% satisfaction rating for courses run in 2014, according to recent feedback.

The acting Board of Directors for Thema (a Board created to support the Thema Global Subject Scheme standard) announced at the London Book Fair today that a pilot draft of the Thema standard has been published. The Thema standard is intended to provide a single unified scheme for the categorisation of book content for the global book trade.