This wide-ranging metadata audit was designed to determine how many of eBOUND’s member publishers’ digital publications were missing from key retailers and why they were missing. It was our goal to fix as many of the errors as we could in order to increase availability.
We investigated four key retailers: Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo and Overdrive. Across all member publishers and digital formats, we found many ebooks and audiobooks were missing from these retailers. We performed an audit of the metadata of thirty-eight publishers, then made repairs using a semi-automated process in Onixsuite and a manual process aided by CoreSource’s reporting.
We discovered that many of those missing books were missing intentionally. It was also apparent that sometimes the problem lay not in the metadata but in the digital publication itself. However, there were many titles which had errors in the metadata that would cause them to be rejected by key retailers. Once we repaired those errors, we saw a 29% percent increase in availability.
While this isn’t as significant of an increase as we had hoped, we believe this work has laid the foundation for future projects.
You can view the whole report here: Metadata Audit, Appendix A, Appendix B