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Just to add my $0.02, I'll give the executive summary from a book publisher's perspective.
When someone submits a book for publication to a distributor, they must provide the metadata (e.g. publisher, title, isbn, countries covered, author and contributor data, descriptions (short and long), price, and I don't know what else.
Commonly, these are provided via an Excel spreadsheet (whose format varies per distributor), OR, an ONIX file (which is an xml file following the ONIX specifications).
Obviously a publisher would prefer to provide ONIX data (in a standard format) to all the distributors, rather than having to prepare individual excel spreadsheets for each.
Thus it would be awesome if Calibre (which already can read the metadata from, say, an epub, and print it), could also convert it into the ONIX XML format. That would save a great amount of double- or triple- or multiple keyboarding in the course of distributing ebooks.
As an aside:
I had initially inquired in the Sigil forum about adding this facility to Sigil but it is kind of peripheral to Sigil's function as an epub editor. Jellby suggested the Calibre forum might be more appropriate, and -- lo and behold -- there is already a thread about it.
I would love to see such a utility added to Calibre! AFIK there isn't anything similar available at present (that is, epub metadata -> ONIX file).
Albert
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