Whilst ONIX is a standard format, all recipients interpret it differently. We therefore tailor our feeds to your recipients. Raise a ticket to ask us to set up an ONIX feed, including the contact details of your recipient.

We will ask them the following questions.

  • Do you accept FTPS?
  • Do you have a document on the ONIX elements that you read and use? We trim the file content down as much as possible in order to avoid unnecessary incremental transmissions.
  • Do you want to include ePub ebooks?
  • For cover images, what is the maximum size (in pixels) you’re happy to accept?
  • Also for cover images, can you read image URLs from the ONIX feed instead of requiring a file?
  • If you do need the file, can you accept ISBN.jpg? We don’t use title-based file naming because they are not unique to the product (we have clients with the same title on different works, and ebook covers sometimes differ from print covers).
  • We would usually start with a full feed, including out of print (OOP) products which you might choose to discard, followed by daily incremental feeds. Daily incremental is sometimes limited to products published within a few months of the current date, with less-urgent changes for products outside of that window being deferred to end of week. Is that OK?

Read a blog post about the complexities that surround interpretations of the ONIX standard.

When asking us to set up an ONIX feed, here are some questions we may ask you:

  • Name of the organisation receiving ONIX data
  • Your contact’s name and email there
  • Version of ONIX to be sent (2.1 or 3.0)
  • FTP Host
  • FTP Port
  • FTP user, password
  • FTP subdirectory
  • Which products should go to them? e.g. ebooks only, published in next 12 months
  • Are there other data requirements? e.g. only USD prices
  • Which images should go to them? e.g. thumbnail cover only
  • How regularly should they go? e.g. monthly
  • Do they want a test feed, and if so, how many records?