Day: July 10, 2007

Onix, Integration and Anko

Eoin Purcell

Today we had a demo
And it was fun. Robin from Anko visited Mercier Press and gave (almost) the entire team a run down on their system. In short, it addressed all the points we had raised in our internal meetings designed to figure out what we wanted and needed from an integrated system.

Anko bill the product heavily on its ability to provide ONIX compliant messages for our partners in the trade. It is essentially one of those back room tasks that makes life easier for them and makes it easier for us to sell books.

From our perspective the time saving of moving from multiple entries for a title to a single easily updated entry that is valid across the entire system is beyond measure. It will be a change to have a single system but a good one and the challenges of data migration seem, at least for now (let’s see how that changes when we begin), a minor inconvenience in achieving it!

Looking forward to integrated-ness
Eoin

Links of Interest (At Least to Me)

Eoin Purcell

Macmillan Launches Lovelybooks.com (great name) a site for book lovers which to me seems like simply a new Librarything.com but what do I know. I am beginning to fear a series of walled book gardens with valuable data locked behind walls of different services. Seems a shameful waste of potential. Speaking of social book sites Publishers Weekly has a wonderful review of US sites.
Here

Comics online. DC Comics is launching a new online and off-line imprint for comics zudacomics.com. From The Bookseller:

The site will accept submissions from the public and viewers can vote on their favorite comics, whose authors will then be offered a year-long contract for web comics and will have their work published in print as well.

“There is an explosion of creativity in web comics,” said Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics, in a statement. “We want to build a great stage for this new generation of creators to perform on, a solid system for their work to reach audiences online and in print, and for the creators to share in the profits their creations can generate.” DC Comics will pay all winners, including up to six “instant winners” per year, for their work.

Here

And of course, I forgot to link to this announcement by google:

Whenever you find an out-of-copyright book in our index, you’ll see a “View plain text” link, which lets anyone access the text layer of the book. As Dr. T.V. Raman explains on the main Google blog, this opens the book to adaptive technologies such as screen readers and Braille display, allowing visually impaired users to read these books just as easily as users with sight.

Here

Fearing gardens and walls
Eoin