Quote:
Originally Posted by wannabee
I'd be pretty surprised if an aggregator uploaded to one if the shops I mentioned via a method that excludes a bisac.
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I've worked with pretty much all of the aggregators, and they all require either ONIX metadata input or they have simple Excel spreadsheets in which they require the publisher (for those uploading via FTP) to input the BISAC data. This is all transferred to the various retailers, again, via FTP, with each book. Their intake software, whether it's Apple, Amazon or Nook, etc., reads the fields in the provided document (XLS or XML) and populates the correct data to the correct location for each book prior to/during publication to their platform. They absolutely
do not read the book metadata--that's provided for display on the individual reading devices, at least, it is at this time.
(This data--spreadsheet or XML correlation after the FTP is also why all entities with real publisher accounts at these retailers, as opposed to, say, a KDP account, all use ISBN's; so that the data correlates correctly. When using an FTP upload, the book is named ISBN.epub (or mobi), the cover is ISBN.jpg and the metadata is all ISBN-driven. FWIW.)
I haven't seen any aggregator options that exclude Keywords; I'm surprised to see that one would do so. Of course, keywords can be easily included within the metadata, but, as discussed, the retailers at this time aren't reading the metadata from within the ePUBs. It's something of a chicken-egg scenario. Or a dog chasing its tail; you can put the keywords in there...but nobody's reading them.
As there's no ePUB standard for it, I'd be surprised to find any aggregator that would pass an ePUB with (no offense) "kluged" metadata into it, and as they aren't reading the metadata, until KWL tells you that
they are, you are kinda beating your head against a rock. Amazon's use of "categories" for searching is created and maintained by them--just like not everyone gets the "leave a review" link at the end of their book from Amazon, not everyone gets the extra categories, either. Amazon's bots and algorithms determine what additional categories (or BISACs) are assigned to any given book.
Hitch