The Book Industry Study Group has been working to combat metadata pollution, in which simple fields like “subtitle” are turned into marketing crud such as, “A Thrilling Suspense Novel from the Bestselling Author of X.” The problem resides on both sides of the Onix feed: “BISG understands that some metadata senders claim they are placing promotional copy in title and subtitle fields explicitly because some retailers do not display the data provided in fields such as ‘Promotional Headline.’ Retailers could be more transparent about how they categorize and display metadata. Without transparency, publishers have chosen ‘known-to-be-indexed’ data elements like subtitle […]
