thanks all. yes. we now know this is for Apple prods. wondering if there is an Industry Standard formula for arriving at a separate Agency price?
thanks all for your feedback!

It sounds like Apple to me too. And maybe someone decided to make the eBook price 80% of the print price, which is pretty common.

We had to add a separate “Agency” price for Apple eBooks, and the price must end in $.99. Apple also requires separate pricing supplied for every territory, while most channels only need USD.

I agree that it’s likely an Apple price, or at least Apple-compatible.

Do you have access to recent ebook data feeds from your old system? It might be helpful to look at those and see whether these prices were used there, and if so, to what vendors.

We have a number of member presses with the ability to send files and metadata to LOC’s CIP program. Most of them are using it to apply specifically for e-book registration, not print.

LOC are getting both book files (PDF) and metadata (ONIX), so pre-publication/galley PDFs would be needed if someone wanted to use this to apply for print…[Read more]

Leah,

I’m wondering if it is to create a price that works for Apple. They require a price that ends in “.99” and require the price to be the best one on offer. Just a guess.

When we first starting pricing e-editions, we dropped the ebook prices by 80%. And we have been pricing our print editions with prices ending in .99 rather than .95 for…[Read more]

any update on this venture? interested.

Thanks, Trond. I don’t really see another way to do it. But it still irks me!

Hi Jana, we too became frustrated with how buried this was, and though we
still mark it in the Edition Number, for most books in 2nd editions (or
beyond) we also make it part of the subtitle, either the edition number or
we make clear that it is a revision/expansion/what-not (especially for our
textbooks and guides this is key info) like…[Read more]

UNC Press uses CoreSource and we have just changed our OA settings from zero price to <UnpricedItem>, and I’m wondering what to do about the Amazon situation, since they still need zero pricing. I was worried that having one ISBN for zero price and another ISBN for <UnpricedItem>, as Trond suggests, would be confusing to other vendors who could…[Read more]

In the full ONIX 3 specification, “$0.00” is not a price that should ever exist. Either a non-zero <Price> block or an <UnpricedItemType> tag should be used.

Ideally, someone properly parsing ONIX should either disallow a price of “$0.00” or, more realistically, treat it differently.

For example:
You can make a book “free” via sending…[Read more]

Robby and Trond,

Thank you so much for your helpful answers!

I’m curious why we have to use “Unpriced Item”. Will some vendors not accept a $0.00 price?

All best,

Andrea

Though I suspect Trond overstates my capability, I appreciate the confidence.

He brings up a point that’s clearer in the slide stack than in what I posted: using multiple eISBNs.

As the slides point out, there are a few ways you might use multiple eISBNs in general.

Your system might allow you to create an “OA” eISBN versus a “free” eISBN (in…[Read more]

Oh and I should mention we don’t use CS (yet), we use Biblio for distribution, so I don’t know if CS actually allows an actual $0 price.  But Biblio does.

Also everything that Robert said, he is always right.

Cheers,

Trond

Hi Andrea, how we get around this is we have separate ISBNs for EPUB and Kindle (so we’re sending the exact same file but under a different ISBN as EPUB to Amazon), which allows us to price the OA EPUB as “unpriced” while the OA Kindle is priced at $0. It doesn’t make sense but it works. Until it doesn’t.

Trond Knutsen

Digital Publishing…[Read more]

I’ll upload the slides from my presentation at AUPresses this year if I can, but the gist of it is that BiblioVault classifies 4 types of vendors in their “OA-ness”:

OA “Only” – hopefully self explanatory, these vendors take ONIX 3, with UnpricedItemType with value “01” for free/no-charge, EpubLicense, and other OA specific tags. OAPEN,…[Read more]

Thanks! This is good to know.

EBSCO was having trouble getting them from their Excel sheets (they do both Excel and ONIX), so we added them to our ONIX 2.1 and ONIX 3 output. It seems to have helped the EBSCO situation. No idea if any other vendors are using the data, but we send it. SubjectSchemeIdentifier “04”