First post!, as it's customary to declare. Welcome to the Bibliocloud blog. We'll use it to let you know what's going on development-wise, as well as keeping you in the loop with news for Bibliocloud's user community. Let me tell you what's going on at the moment... This last week's been exciting. I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with Joshua from The Bookseller during which I waved my hands around excitedly and talked ten-to-the-dozen about the supply chain, the vagaries of independent publishing and metadata. Despite this, he still wrote a lovely piece about Bibliocloud which resulted in a flurry of goodwill and sign-ups. We've got around 40 live client accounts at the moment. The trick, though, is making sure that everyone's making the most of the system. To this end we ran a training day on Friday, paid for by our Arts Council England grant. We had a good turn out - to the extent that we had a waiting list, so we'll be running another one in the New Year. Email me if you'd like more details.
The training agenda covered most of the basics - navigation, search and select, and setting up works, their contributors, and their editions. We looked at how to import data, such as your ISBN13 list, your sales, and your existing book data from CSV or ONIX, or from scraping the internet. Then we exported data - in ONIX 2.1 and 3, and in the form of PDF AIs, a frontlist and backlist catalogue, CSV files and Excel spreadsheets complete with graphs and totals rows, as well as a life-saving rights guide (if you've ever realised the night before Frankfurt that you haven't done one...), a title verso page and PDF statements. We looked at ONIX validation for both 2.1 and 3.0. Bibliocloud validates against the ONIX schemas, but also against reality - so the validator will fail if you have named a book "placeholder" or "tbc", for instance. We then looked at FTPing images and ONIX data to data aggregators at the click of a button.
We looked at the acquisition, forecasting, print and scheduling area which is still under development - it'll be finished in Feb 2013 but already it has Gantt chart schedulers, a sales forecasting tool and a supplier tender function. Bibliocloud's been producing royalty statements for a couple of years for Snowbooks, so we looked at rights, royalties and contracts including the rather gorgeous royalty statement PDF that the system generates.
And a bunch of other stuff that came up when we went off on tangents. It was a good, fun day and I'm looking forward to the next one - I'll let you know when it is.
More blogging to come...back to development for now!