The book publishing industry – like the newspaper and magazine sectors – is in a state of becoming. Becoming what is the question. The digitization of book content is changing more than book form – it’s changing the entire channel-driven supply chain.

The middleman bookstore, real-world and virtual, is still kicking, but, asks Joseph Esposito, CEO of GiantChair, “with electronic books do you need all that?” And if publishers don’t need all that – or at least if they don’t any longer need to see that as their exclusive portal to sales – how do they get visitors to their sites to build a direct relationship with readers? One answer: Have good metadata, get more search engine traffic, sell more books.

GiantChair’s vision is to be the direct marketing services provider for the industry, helping publishers with rich and structured metadata in combination with web and e-commerce tools to create optimized online catalogues that buyers will be drawn to through search. “That is what the semantic web is about – atomization of content, drilling deep into any body of data and having tags to bring people to the specific information they want,” Esposito says. “The disruptive aspect is the ability to atomize portals, and bring you very specific bits of information if they’re properly tagged. Because of Google and the Google ecosystem you can imagine a world where publishers sell books directly to the end user, bypassing the supply chain.”

Free the Metadata
GiantChair tells publishers that it’s time for them to position themselves as the authoritative source of metadata for each ISBN in their catalogs, taking back control of what is already out there and flowing across the Internet. Its blog takes up the cause that metadata should be free – available in an Onix-compliant metadata format; of sufficient quality and richness to be considered as the best source of metadata for the ISBN in question; and freely available to all parties wishing to access it. That’s metadata – not data, Esposito explains, and logically there are only a couple of instances when its free availability might create issues: When second-hand bookstores use it for their sales, from which publishers won’t themselves profit, and concerns that someone might surround the metadata in an undignified wrapper, such as with ads for pornographic sites.

That said, “as far as metadata being free I have to say I am in sympathy with the notion,” he says. Publishing outfits want their books exposed in as many places as possible. “Setting up barriers to dissemination [of metadata] is not in their interest,” he says. It’s not the same as making books themselves free, as publishers still control who to ship physical or virtual copies to.

Metadata is meaningless without some set of business rules for fulfillment on metadata, he points out. And he believes that the status of metadata for the online display of books around the world “is still a jungle. There are very few fully certified Onix feeds out there, so it’s pretty wild.” As a service provider to publishers, GiantChair offers a hosted platform to publishers to create and enrich metadata – in one centralized and automatically updated catalogue – for direct sales as well as for Onix feeds of the metadata to partners like Google, Amazon and others.

Esposito says GiantChair is working with about 100 publishers at this point. Though the biggest market for its services is in the U.S., which represents about 40 percent of the global publishing business, many of its customers are overseas, including in France, where founder Cory McCloud is based. “We are growing rapidly in France and Belgium right now, and beginning to implement a strategy to have a more international presence,” Esposito says, noting there’s been a lot of interest on this side of the big pond. “People are asking, is this the time for direct marketing? They don’t know how to do it and they want to know what can we do together.”

One of its U.S. clients is the fabled CityLights Books in San Francisco, which is both a bookseller and publisher. “We built that entire site and we’re very proud of that,” Esposito says. “It’s an instance where we helped a bookstore get its entire catalogue of books onto the ‘Net, and they do the fulfillment themselves.”

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