EDItEUR Series 12: EDItX E-Commerce Standards

Metadata management is an important aspect of publishing at any scale. It's the key information about a publisher's products that needs to be shared with the remainder of the supply chain - from the basic title, author, ISBN, cover image, publication date and price, to richer information like abstracts or summaries, contributor biographies, open access licenses, even manufacturing details for downstream POD, and details of international distribution arrangements. Metadata is often communicated via ONIX, a standardised and comprehensive data file format that publishers, retailers, libraries and various intermediaries use, across many countries. It encompasses bibliographic information about the book itself, but also the vital marketing collateral and commercial arrangements. If
you're unfamiliar with ONIX, there's a 15-minute video briefing available at doi:10.4400/anjr. While ONIX is EDItEUR's best-known standard, it is also responsible for Thema (a subject category scheme that helps specify what a book is about) and a less well-known family of e-commerce standards called EDItX.

EDItX. It's an unfamiliar name to most publishers - and to their various downstream supply chain partners - but alongside the more well-known ONIX and Thema, it's part of EDItEUR's portfolio of standards.

So what is it? EDItX is in fact a whole family of standard file formats. Most members of the family are transactional message files, documents like stock enquiries, orders, invoices or returns request, plus their various response messages. For further details see the EDItEUR website. But two members of the family are different, and they are for inventory and sales reporting - see https://www.editeur.org/53/Sales-and-Inventory-Reporting/.

The EDItX inventory report is a message file intended to be sent by resellers of one kind or another, or those that aggregate data from resellers, back to the publisher or to the publisher's primary distributor. Its purpose is to report physical inventory holdings - 12 copies of this, 248 copies of that in stock.

But it can also be used in the digital supply chain and for print on demand scenarios, where master files of e-books or digital audio, plus the relevant metadata, is distributed to resellers. Many publishers find they must monitor numerous reseller websites in order to check each of their products goes on sale at the appointed date, and discovering why a product is not on sale can be particularly onerous. The EDItX inventory report allows the status of the master file and the metadata for each to be reported proactively to the publisher and digital distributor.

In the physical domain, the format allows the following reporting options:

• For physical inventories applying to a specific date (and optionally, time):
  • Current inventory levels (quantities on hand), including whether they are available to fulfil new orders received in future, or reserved to fulfil orders already received but not yet dispatched;
  • Quantities on order, also categorized as being available or reserved;
  • Quantities required to meet outstanding orders, but for which current or on-order stock quantities have not yet been allocated;

• For physical inventories applying to a period from one date (and time) to another:
  • Minimum and maximum inventory levels during the reporting period, as well as levels at the end of the period;
  • Quantities despatched during the reporting period;
  • Quantities that have been lost during the reporting period;
  • Quantities that have been damaged or destroyed;
  • Quantities that have been moved to another storage location / outlet;
  • Quantities that have been removed from inventory for other reasons.

For digital products and in print-on-demand scenarios:

• For digital and POD inventories applying to a specific date (and optionally, time):
  • The status of master files and metadata, and the on-sale status of the product;
  • Where the status reports an issue, codes can indicate the steps needed to resolve the issue and more detailed error reporting can be provided.

Each of these options can be provided either as a single, standalone report from the seller to the publisher, or a single report can aggregate details from multiple standalone reports;

• An aggregate report may contain one or more 'inner reports', each inner report being a standalone report received from sellers by the aggregator - for example by a digital asset distributor aggregating reports from multiple digital retail platforms, or by a physical distributor aggregating reports from multiple wholesalers. The aggregated set of inner reports can then be passed on to the original supplier or publisher as a
  single message file;
• A digital distributor supplying five digital retailers or retail platforms could thus report to a publisher via a single message containing five inner reports.

As might be expected from EDItEUR, the EDItX inventory report is a carefully defined and well-structured XML-based message, suitable for global, multilingual and multi-currency use. It shares many principles with ONIX, but is tailored specifically to stock reporting. Its structure mirrors line-by-line e-commerce reports rather than product-by-product records. But alongside that XML structure, this was the first EDItEUR message standard to gain a defined JSON option - senders and recipients can choose to use either syntax.

The choice between XML and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) might be considered in terms of detailed syntax. But given a range of trade-offs, they are largely equivalent. XML may be more easily human-readable, JSON a little more difficult but less verbose. JSON can often be simpler to implement, at least for simple message formats, but validation of messages using an XML schema can ensure a high degree of interoperability even with large and complex messages. JSON schema validation is much less comprehensive. But the real reasoning behind choosing one or the other is often generational: how old are your developers? Younger developers often prefer JSON.

The EDItX Sales Report format (doi:10.4400/sdke) reports on sales (and for the US any sales taxes), as individual sales transactions or as totals for a range of transaction, over a particular reporting period:

• Under different classes of sale (retail, agency, wholesale, export etc), and potentially also classified by retail outlet;
• With calculations of payments due to the supplier of the products, based on net costs or on list prices minus a business-to-business discount, or agency prices minus a commission, and including any seller's fees, so the supplier can create the relevant invoices;
• And optionally, the report can include details of any sales or value-added taxes.

The EDItX Sales Report format does not yet have a JSON syntax option, but a JSON version is planned.

BISG has in the past published a highly simplified flat file version derived from an early version of the EDItX sales report (see here) but this is likely over-simplified for international use.

Whether you and your supply chain partners choose the XML or JSON option, the EDItX inventory report tackles two real-world issues. The EDItX sales report is also rooted in real use cases and an essential, universal requirement to report sales of digital products. But the ever-present issue with EDItX is that - to date - few have implemented these report formats. Perhaps it is simpler for resellers to provide spreadsheet sales reports which require manual wrangling to import them into publisher's sales and revenue analysis systems. Perhaps it is beneficial to resellers to place the onus upon suppliers to log in, in order to generate and download custom reports, or to scrape status data from individual web pages within an online store. But this doesn't reduce aggregate costs across the supply chain - it merely moves costs around within the supply chain. Real benefits could flow from more widespread adoption of standardised inventory and sales reporting infrastructure.

Graham Bell
Executive director, EDItEUR

EDItEUR is an independent member-supported trade association and standards body that's best known for developing, supporting and promoting the ONIX and Thema standards, ensuring our 'metadata supply chain' remains based on open and free-to-use standards. The latest versions of its standards specifications can be found on the EDItEUR website https://www.editeur.org/ and you can subscribe to EDItEUR's mailing list news-from+[email protected] for occasional news about our activities.