Transcript: New from BookNet Canada for 2025: BNC BiblioShare - Tech Forum 2025

Hello. And welcome. Thanks for tuning in to this year's BiblioShare talk at Tech Forum
2025. My name is Tim Middleton, and I am a product manager for BNC BiblioShare here at
BookNet Canada. Before I get started with my short presentation, I will take this opportunity
to acknowledge that BookNet Canada and its operations are remote, and our colleagues
contribute to their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the
Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi'kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William
First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the Ojibwa, the
Odawa, and the Potawatomi and the Métis, the original nations and peoples of the lands we
now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vaughan, and Windsor.
We encourage you to visit the nativeland.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose
land you are joining from today. Moreover, BookNet endorses the calls to action from the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and supports an ongoing shift from
gatekeeping to space-making in the book industry. The book industry has long been an
industry of gatekeeping. Anyone who works at any stage of the book supply chain carries a
responsibility to serve readers by publishing, promoting, and supplying works that represent
the wide extent of human experiences and identities in all that complicated intersectionality.
We at BookNet are committed to working with our partners in the industry as we move
towards a framework that supports space-making, which ensures that marginalized creators
and professionals all have the opportunity to contribute, work, and lead.
In last year's BiblioShare update, I introduced you to two new team members, Stephanie
Small and Shuvanjan Karmaker. Stephanie and Shuvanjan have been an indispensable
addition to our small but mighty team at BookNet. I will be sharing details about some of the
things they have been working on, but before I share updates, I wanted to highlight some
other news about our team.
As I've often expressed here in these yearly updates, the supply chain is a very dynamic,
sometimes insanely so, place from which to observe the book industry. That has not changed.
And if anything, as hard as it is to believe after years of COVID, Suez Canal Crisis,
atmospheric rivers, and paper shortages, the uncertainty of the United States of America with
their truculent administration and woefully misguided tariff war has made even more chaos
in the supply chain. Just another day in the supply chain space.
But above and beyond this moment in time, our own small not-for-profit BookNet team has
been experiencing our own losses and struggles. As some of you who may be tuned into the
space will know, we lost the guiding light of CEO and president of BookNet, Noah Genner.
Noah was an irreplaceable resource for our BiblioShare team. I will share with you that it
was Noah and I who originally worked on BiblioShare. And although Noah had bigger tasks
to attend to when he became CEO, he never lost his focus on the brilliance of metadata and
how we could leverage the data we were gathering in BiblioShare for our products and the
industry. Noah always had his finger on the pulse of the supply chain. Our team misses his
contributions to policy, to web services, and his keen insights of the global supply chain. I
cannot give a worthy enough tribute to Noah Genner and all that he brought to BiblioShare,
but we miss his inputs and all of his talents.

And tragically, we lost another invaluable, pivotal person at BookNet this year. You may not
be as familiar with the role that our co-worker and director of product development, Jackie
Fry, played on our BiblioShare team, but I can assure you Jackie's passion for detail and
longing for meaning in the metadata paid huge dividends. She straddled the world of Bowker
data and BiblioShare data like no one else. Jackie never shied away from the difficult tasks
that were put in front of her, one of those being the project manager of our early attempt at
what we called and still call BISH 2.
And finally, if those two gaping holes were not enough to sink a cargo ship, then the slowly
opening abyss that is unfolding in the slow exit of BookNet's bibliographic manager, Tom
Richardson, will certainly put a few dings in the hull of our BiblioShare boat. In many ways,
when people think of BiblioShare, they inevitably think of Tom Richardson. Tom has been
the laser beam of accuracy for so many publishers and distributors longing to understand the
deep meaning of ONIX. We are already missing his full attention on the BiblioShare team.
Not to get too philosophical, but this is life. It is dynamic, changing all the time, just the way
your metadata should be. And with all of these changes hitting the good ship BookNet, I am
more and more impressed with the resiliency of the BookNet team. And with that, let's share
some of what the team has been focused on this year, aside from just surviving.
Our focus, as it has been for some time now, is to migrate to ONIX version 3.0. Actually,
ONIX version 3.1 now, but I digress. By this, I mean not only our own products, but also all
of those accounts that they're still needing 2.1 support. There are still quite a few, but it is
coming. ONIX 3.0 is finally going to sweep the nation. Why? I'm sure you have heard of a
little company called Amazon, and I am equally sure you know that Amazon has announced
that they will discontinue its support of the 2.1 version of ONIX very soon. March 2026 is
the target date. This is an area that Stephanie Small has been carving up. She has pretty much
mastered the 2.1 to 3.0 mappings for our custom projects, and is now being tapped to do a lot
of heavy lifting for the BISH 2 project. I would say that Stephanie is rapidly becoming the
new guru of ONIX data on our team, although I'm sure Stephanie would argue that. It's not
an easy role, but Stephanie is a natural born data wrangler. We're happy to have her.
And Shuvanjan Karmaker has taken the reins of our product BiblioShare Webform.
Shuvanjan went deep here and helped to migrate our accounts and documentation over to the
new release of BiblioShare Webform. Now, we are able to support small independent clients
with the creation of ONIX data that leverages the improvements, all those amazing
improvements of ONIX 3.0. While there is still the simple Webform view that users are
familiar with from Webform version 1, in Webform 2.0, the ability to add slightly more
complex ONIX data is supported through an advanced form. Here, you can see all those tabs
up there, descriptive detail, measure and extent, contributor, collection, and you can see that
there's a lot more support available. If you look up at the catalogue entry at the top of this
image, you can see Webform now supports 3.0.
So, I hope you can appreciate all the changes taking place in the BiblioShare space. And if
you know BiblioShare the way we know BiblioShare, you know that merging is one of the
great strengths of BiblioShare. And as it turns out, not just merging between publisher and

supplier data, but now with the old staff merging with the new staff. We hope the same
strength and value continues to grow. Now, that is a merge.
I will mention one other project that occupied our resources and time in 2024, and then we
will start to dive into some numbers. As you may know, we built an app for the Shopify POS
platform a number of years ago called Bookstore Builder, BiblioShare Bookstore Builder. It
has found quite a bit of success in the time since we built that, but keeping up with Shopify
changes can be quite challenging at times. A big change they made was the deprecation of
their RESTful [SP] API, which our Bookstore Builder app was leveraging. They made usage
of the GraphQL structured APIs mandatory. So, our developers worked away on porting our
code and making the changes required. Not an easy task, but thankfully for our Shopify
users, we were able to get that done before the deadline. Sure, you may not notice a
difference, although the GraphQL pattern is much better than the REST pattern. Rest
assured, this was a bigger-than-a-bread-box change.
That's about it for the recap of what has occupied the BiblioShare team in the past year. We
hope you share our excitement in being able to bring better support, more agile development,
and more useful ways of distributing all this marvelous metadata in BiblioShare. And that is
a perfect segue into BiblioShare by the numbers, where we look at, well, numbers.
First up, ONIX 2.1 dataset. In 2024, the BiblioShare ONIX 2.1 dataset grew by about
217,000 records. This is actually about 20,000 less than what we received in 2024, 2023, I
should say. But our 3.0 dataset saw about the same rate of growth as what we saw in 2023. In
2025, we're hoping to get this number way up. The BiblioShare team is focused on this
problem now, and a solution is at hand to increase the amount of ONIX 3.0 we can process
while sunsetting our support for ONIX 2.1.
In this slide, we're looking at the daily average intake of data for both new records and
updated records in BiblioShare. So, in 2024, our average intake of new records, records that
were not in BiblioShare, is at about 1,125 per day. And then our average updated number is
getting up close to 100,000 a day. So, that's a lot of data processing.
Bibliographic data is not static, at least not until the thing it is describing is no longer
available. Here, we can see that the year 2024 is lower than previous years, perhaps
indicating a move away from 2.1 data, as we've seen previous years. But looking at the 3.0
data, we see that the dataset is down over 2023. And the average number of updated records
has declined. But overall, this dataset continues to grow, as we saw in the earlier slide. I'll
add my usual hopeful message and say with more confidence that next year at this time,
these numbers will be exponentially higher as there is less and less technical debt out there
around 2.1 data.
In 2024, all told, we created 69 new or newish accounts in BiblioShare. And this is a slight
bump over last year of about 6%. The breakdown of publisher and supplier ONIX accounts
show us that we are still adding more 2.1 accounts than 3.0. But 3.0 is going to balloon, take
over this year with the 3.0 announcements coming out of the major players like Amazon and
also Ingram.

What continues to amaze us about BiblioShare BookNet is the volume of consumption of our
web services and use of our Shopify plugin. We had 31 new accounts established for either
using our web services or in order to support their Shopify stores. This 10% increase over
last year shows the continual interest in, and need for, this bibliographic service in the supply
chain. As we continue to build the holdings in BiblioShare of supporting materials, here, we
see that we added 6% to our cover images database. So, we now have close to 4 million
publicly accessible covers on hand.
Interior images, which are clearly one of the most obvious supports for everything from art
books to children's books when consumers are making buying decisions, grew by 16% in
2022. But in 2024, which we're talking about, grew by 13% to reach almost 667,000 images.
Author images continued to trickle along, and our author images grew by 3% in 2024.
And here is a look at how the rest of the supporting materials database is growing. It's
definitely growing. The explosive growth of the first couple of years for the samples and
excerpts holdings has tapered off, but hopefully, this is because we are just in a regular
workflow now to deliver those as part of your book records, and so, there is no great backlog
to be uploaded. At least that's my takeaway, my optimistic takeaway from looking at these
numbers. So, always interesting to see what kind of data and how much of it we are
continuously processing, but equally interesting is this question. Is the data being used? And
who is using all of this data?
Well, once again, our web services were very busy. This 190 million number excludes any of
our in-house use of the APIs, although we do use the exact same APIs, which I'll show you
later as we make available to the public for Bibli-O-Matic, CataList, coverage in SalesData,
etc. We do see the value of this data, believe me.
And here's a list of the active web services, and what is being pulled, and the counts against
those services. I like seeing the image info service growth. I have a little update after this
slide about that. Basically, what it means to me is that people are leveraging the timestamp as
we were hoping. Here is our ImageList service, very similar to our ImageInfo service, but the
ImageInfo service only returns our cover images. So, you're only finding out about covers.
We made a slight change. We took away the interiors from the service, and added it to the
ImageList service. So, here, you can check the date processed in the same way if you're using
the image service, you can see what the sizes are and what the perspectives. So, in this shot,
we're seeing there's a cover, there's a back cover, and there's a bunch of interiors. So, here,
you can grab all of the images, see all of the details on all of the images in our data set rather
than just hitting the ImageInfo service.
So, I hope people will start to leverage this service. Continue to use the ImageInfo service if
you're only looking for covers, but if you're looking for more than just covers, then the
ImageList service is the one for you.
Here is the list of our top 25 plus 1, 26 just to make it fun, sort of in the purple cow kind of
way, 26 top users. The cool thing about this list is that it shows the flexibility of the services.
So, out of the 166 users that I'm showing, the 26 here, these users are made up of solution
providers like ReaderBound, in-house solutions like Whitehots, Shopify users, publisher

sites, distributor sites, retail sites, and author sites. And of course, you may have noticed I
left in the BookNet products in this list. This should give you an idea of the spread of usage.
BookNet is certainly not the only heavy user of the BiblioShare data, but we do use it quite a
bit.
And that was a quick tour through 2024 for BiblioShare data. Our focus remains on ONIX
3.0 data, and migrating solutions and support to that data set. But we also have a couple of
other projects keeping us up at night. Keep your eye on this space for a recap of your
favourite supply chain series, "The Supply Chain." Are we resilient yet? Thank you very
much. See you next year.

Transcript: New from BookNet Canada for 2025: BNC BiblioShare - Tech Forum 2025

More Related Content

Similar to Transcript: New from BookNet Canada for 2025: BNC BiblioShare - Tech Forum 2025 (20)

More from BookNet Canada (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

Transcript: New from BookNet Canada for 2025: BNC BiblioShare - Tech Forum 2025