S3 Support for ONIX...

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S3 moves to support the ONIX International Standard as part of the S3-CISPUB^TM product

Phoenix, AZ. - September 22, 2000. S3 Publishing Technologies, Inc. today announced the plan to provide integrated support of the ONIX international standard for the exchange of bibliographic data by publishers, distributors and booksellers, within the widely used S3-CISPUB^TM Publishing ERP system. The standard, known as ONIX (ONline Information eXchange) International, was immediately endorsed by Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, and other major U.S. e-tailers, retailers, wholesalers and bibliographic suppliers. The standard and its User Guide provide a scheme of XML tags for identifying all of the information about a book - from title, author, publisher, cover graphics, author biography, reviews, down to details such as dimensions and weight.

As publishers and distributors provide more titles for sale and distribution in this rapidly changing marketplace, they will need to provide product information to those businesses in a new and standard format. That rapidly developing, broad market channel will rely on the publisher being able to deliver timely information about their products in this new format.

Publishers will have the ability to provide all of the ONIX Level 1 information in XML format to their distributors, delivering access to new channels of distribution and incremental increases in sales to those publishers. Increased channel sales and ease of use of the S3-CISPUB^TM ONIX module will make the publisher's job easier and will, at the same time, keep operating costs for this new channel at a minimum.

A preliminary version of ONIX, developed by a working group of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), was released last January. The new ONIX International version, developed and maintained by EDItEUR jointly with the Association of American Publishers, Book Industry Communication and the Book Industry Study Group, represents a major advance, incorporating XML tagging and many refinements hammered out over the intervening months. The complete documentation is available free of charge. Please visit http://www.editeur.org/onix.html for complete information and free download link.

Sandra K. Paul, Executive Director of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) has worked on this standard and is in contact with S3 Publishing Technologies, Inc. about S3's integration plans for the ONIX standard. S3 will be working with BISG on the certification of the ONIX integration project. Sandra can be contacted at (212)929-1393 or by email at Sandy@bookinfo.org.

S3 sees this as a very important agenda for its clients, as major e-tailers start to support this new technology/solution. Amazon.com is presently testing the ONIX International format with several large US publishers and is anxious to have all of their partners using ONIX to send their book, music and video data in this new standardized format. Barnes & Noble has the same goal and anticipates improvements in operations as a result of the ONIX International standard. In addition to these two major e-tailers, other organizations prepared to accept ONIX International data include: the American Bookseller's Association BookSense website, Baker & Taylor, R. R. Bowker, Follett, Ingram, Login Brothers Book Company in the US (and their Ernesto Reichmann Distribuidora de Livros Ltd. in Brazil), MUZE, NetRead, and Reiter's Books.

S3 Publishing Technologies, Inc. is a Phoenix, Arizona based consultant and developer of publishing industry ERP software tools, with an installed base of publishers in the US, Canada and other countries.

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