Since this post, additional price qualifiers have been added to the ONIX code lists to more effectively differentiate corporate, library, and educational prices. You can find the most up-to-date price qualifiers for Code List 52 here.
With the growing list of ebooks being made available to libraries for patron loan, we’ve seen a lot of experimentation with different publisher payment models, from loan limitations to different up-front pricing for libraries with unlimited loan licensing. If your publishing house has opted for this second option — or even if you have the same pricing for consumer and library purchase, but you want to be clear about this to the supply chain — how do you indicate this in your ONIX record?
The <PriceQualifier> element in ONIX is used to indicate market price, and code ‘06’ from the applicable code list 59 indicates a library price. Here are the step-by-step instructions on explicitly stating your pricing for the library market, using <PriceQualifier>:
In your typical basic price composite, you include the Price Type Code (typically ‘01’ for North America to indicate RRP before tax), the Price Amount, and the Currency Code for that Price Amount.
The price composite is repeatable, so to add another price to your Supply Detail, all you have to do is add another composite. In this repeat of the composite, you need to add a line immediately after your <PriceTypeCode> to show that the price information within this composite is applicable to libraries (code ‘06’).
The whole thing, nested into the supply detail, looks like this. If you use a Price Qualifier in one Price Composite you should do so across the board, so add code ‘05’ in the <PriceQualifier> element to clearly identify when a price is for consumers!
Data recipients can then pick and choose the data points that apply to them. An application like CataList can filter the display of price elements by account type, so that library pricing is displayed specifically to libraries and consumer prices to retailers and others. If no library price is provided, libraries may attempt to purchase the ebook at the consumer price, or make the assumption that the ebook is not available for library purchase since no price is provided.
This is just the first step in supporting alternate sales terms. On the horizon is ONIX 3.0, which will also allow you to specify loan and license terms for digital products as well making the full extent of library terms available to be communicated in your ONIX file. You can read up on ONIX 3.0 on the EDItEUR website.
