Introducing BookEngine

Over the last 5 years Mint has worked with a number of book publishers and we’ve seen similar problems crop up repeatedly. To solve these problems, we created a piece of software called BookEngine.

What problems do we see?

Typical problems include:

1. Marketing outruns metadata management

The publisher often has a main site, several imprint sites and often many author or topic sites. Publishers always have lots of books. And of course, they only have a finite amount of time.

While a publisher’s flagship site may have an automated feed of books from the title management software (often in ONIX format), the marketing department spins off a bunch of sites that all require manual data entry to maintain the catalogue.

These imprint, author, and topic sites are good in theory but they require an enormous amount of repetitive work to keep the book information current. And often the web flows make it even harder: we’ve seen situations where a publisher has to update the same information twice for one website — once for the catalogue and once for the shopping cart.

Given this hassle, often the response is to reign in the marketing team or roadblock the imprints. Neither path gains wider readership or attracts more authors to your brand.

2. To e-commerce, or not to e-commerce

While almost all publishers rely on resellers for a majority of sales, it often makes sense to sell direct given the right community. Making your content management system and e-commerce solution work together while delivering consistent search and title management is not an easy nut to crack.

3. Imprints want creative freedom

Imprints love their distinct vibes and want to nurture their distinctiveness. That means they often build their own sites, perhaps using different technology or agencies to the mothership. This leads to a multitude of sites and a maintenance headache.

BookEngine in a nutshell

BookEngine is a metadata ingestion and manipulation engine. It lets you drive your website off your ONIX feed. What does that mean, I hear you ask?

In layman’s terms, BookEngine pulls in data each night from your title management software. It then allows you to do a batch of stuff to the data. And then it pushes that data to the websites that you’ve specified.

What’s the ‘batch of stuff’ you might want to do to your own data? Some examples of things publishers regularly want to do:

• Amend the BISAC or BIC information to make the categories better fit the situation
• Specify special prices or bulk deals
• Append PDFs or extra digital downloads
• Add hi-res imagery and book covers
• Tweak the product description

Of course, this information needs to persist. So even as the fresh data is pulled in every night, the changes don’t get overwritten (unless you want them to be overwritten).

How does BookEngine solve these problems?

Let’s go back to the three problems, to see how BookEngine helps.

1. Marketing outruns metadata management

Bingo! This is the heart of BookEngine and solved out of the box.

2. To e-commerce, or not to e-commerce

One of the unexpectedly powerful things about BookEngine is it allows the publisher’s entire family of sites to be updated on a piecemeal basis. BookEngine gives a consistent spine to a publisher’s digital footprint. Each imprint site or author site can be upgraded at the appropriate time, with the knowledge that it will be plugging into a consistent data source.

BookEngine works with most modern content management systems and ecommerce software (including WordPress, Craft, Shopify and probably whatever else takes your fancy). These are mobile friendly, responsive and incorporate best practice out of the box. BookEngine also gives all your sites excellent search experience with instant, relevant results delivered from the first key stroke.

3. Imprints want creative freedom

BookEngine allows imprints to use their own designers and content management systems, if they want. It allows the imprint to specify where the book data is presented and how it is presented. It allows the imprint to specify which books are shown and what category they are displayed under (and this can vary by site, if necessary). But this is all done with an underlying structure that ensures consistency across the publishing house.

For more information, visit BookEngine. Or better still, get in touch. We’d love to chat!

Originally published at mintdigital.com.