FAQs

Bowker is the leading provider of bibliographic data. You pay nothing to submit your data to Bowker. Sending your product data to Bowker ensures that your titles will be exposed to more than 3,000 subscribers of our Books In Print and Global Books In Print websites. Our customers come from many sectors of the book industry:

• Bowker has over 1,800 library customers including The New York Public Library, Harvard University Library, and the British Library. In total, more than 5,000 libraries and branch locations can access your data.
• Bowker’s major retail customers include Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Follett . Many independent and smaller retailers also use our data.
• School systems, including the New York City Department of Education, rely on Bowker-provided data to procure books.

Additionally, your product data may be included in Bowker products throughout the supply chain. Bowker offers an array of services such as:

• Live inventory look-up and order transmission systems (PubEasy, Pubnet).
• Library catalog enrichment content (Syndetic Solutions).
• Sales tracking applications (PubTrack applications for BookNet Canada and the Higher Education and Christian market segments).

Bowker aims to provide an experience similar to browsing through a physical book. Again, this is free to publishers. For selected titles, we will:

• Apply enhanced subject classification.
• Append review citations, bestseller listings and media mentions.
• Display tables of contents, excerpts, and first chapters.

These added pieces of information allow online users to really value your product. Bowker’s large customer base, supply chain services and added value content translate to opportunities for increased sales for your titles. Comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date data mean fewer customer service calls and misdirected orders for your staff.

ProQuest's Bowker Book Data is comprehensive and inclusive, with over 50 million records from publishers and other authorities, updated daily. Bowker Book Data will work with you to find the solution that best fits your needs and deliver data however you need it.

Bowker requests that you supply data for all materials of interest to retailers, libraries, and school systems. These items typically have a valid, unique ISBN-13, EAN or UPC applied to them. Types of items include:

• printed books including print-on-demand titles
• e-books
• audio books and spoken word audio
• video, both educational and trade titles
• maps
• calendars and diaries
• mixed media such as book + CD or textbook + student workbook + teacher’s guide
• novelty books such as bath books and sound books
• wall charts, flashcards and other educational materials

Our goal is to capture as much information about each item as is available. If you have information on your website or in your catalogs that Bowker has not specifically named, please discuss this with your Bowker account manager. If the materials you publish or sell meet all of the above requirements, but are only sold through a single retail outlet or school, please discuss with Bowker how we may assist in communicating your title information to specific customers while excluding it from our general database.

Please, choose the method that best suits your company. Larger publishers and tech-savvy smaller publishers will use our ONIX guidelines. If you are not able to provide ONIX files, you can use our standardized Excel template. Whether you are submitting data in ONIX or Excel, please refer to our Image specifications. We currently require an image feed separate from your bibliographic data file. More information can be found at https://www.bowker.com/en/title-submissions/ For publishers producing fewer than 100 titles per year, MyIdentifiers.com is a free web interface you can use to enter titles into our database.

Bowker’s Data Services team will work with you to review and test your bibliographic data file. Together, we will ensure that it meets industry specifications and allows for any unique information you may have above these standards. You will be assigned a set of analysts and an account manager to work with you through this process. The result is clean data within Bowker’s database and, in turn, any customer databases. Further, Bowker realizes that collecting and transmitting this information often involves multiple people in your office. If we can assist you in explaining bibliographic or metadata standards to other staff at your company, we are happy to do so. Also, if you need assistance in cleaning up data within your systems, please inquire about our Data Review Service. We will work towards maximizing sales for your company based on timely and accurate data in our system.