Whilst ONIX is a standard format, all recipients interpret it differently. We therefore tailor our feeds to your recipients. Raise a ticket to ask us to set up an ONIX feed, including the contact details of your recipient.
We will ask them the following questions.
- Do you accept FTPS?
- Do you have a document on the ONIX elements that you read and use? We trim the file content down as much as possible in order to avoid unnecessary incremental transmissions.
- Do you want to include ePub ebooks?
- For cover images, what is the maximum size (in pixels) you’re happy to accept?
- Also for cover images, can you read image URLs from the ONIX feed instead of requiring a file?
- If you do need the file, can you accept ISBN.jpg? We don’t use title-based file naming because they are not unique to the product (we have clients with the same title on different works, and ebook covers sometimes differ from print covers).
- We would usually start with a full feed, including out of print (OOP) products which you might choose to discard, followed by daily incremental feeds. Daily incremental is sometimes limited to products published within a few months of the current date, with less-urgent changes for products outside of that window being deferred to end of week. Is that OK?
Read a blog post about the complexities that surround interpretations of the ONIX standard.
When asking us to set up an ONIX feed, here are some questions we may ask you:
- Name of the organisation receiving ONIX data
- Your contact’s name and email there
- Version of ONIX to be sent
- FTP Host
- FTP Port
- FTP user, password
- FTP subdirectory
- Which products should go to them? e.g. ebooks only, published in next 12 months
- Are there other data requirements? e.g. only USD prices
- Which images should go to them? e.g. thumbnail cover only
- How regularly should they go? e.g. monthly
- Do they want a test feed, and if so, how many records?