Many publishers are relying less and less on print catalogues and moving to digital-first or digital-only catalogues. It saves the cost of printing and mailing, but the general process is still the same: editorial, marketing, and design teams collaborate to create an extensive catalogue by hand. This is typically weeks of effort every season. With a ReaderBound site, presses have the opportunity to save not only money, but also time: by leveraging the ONIX data within the website to generate and export catalogues with just a few clicks.
How does it work? The press selects titles for the catalogue and the website exports the title data directly to an InDesign template. There is still some fine-tuning to be done for the final design, but this builds on the metadata and related workflows on the website to dramatically speed the process of a traditional catalogue production. Let’s look at Livres Canada Books (LCB) as an example.
LCB publishes two catalogues each year, including Rights Canada (which showcases Canadian books for which foreign rights are available) and Canadian Studies Collection, which promotes titles recommended for adoption in Canadian Studies courses and library collections abroad.
Nearly the entire process of creating these catalogues is now driven via the website. Publishers use the custom dashboard on the site to register each ISBN and provide some custom detail specifically for the catalogue. The site then automatically populates the rest of the catalogue detail from the ONIX record. The combined data goes to a French or English copy editor, according to the original language of publication for the ISBN, who takes care of any errors/issues/style changes. After the copyedit, an LCB staffer reviews the compiled listings. The catalogue data is then exported into a carefully structured XML file which is imported directly into an Adobe InDesign template for the catalogue. The end result is a beautifully designed catalogue that can be circulated worldwide in print and PDF formats, and that is produced with much less staff time than would otherwise be required.
