Blog — BookNet Canada

bisac

BISAC Codes: Aboriginal Fiction

Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) Subject Headings are the North American standard for classifying subject information for your books. Your books + BISAC subjects codes = glorious discoverability. This evolving standard is based on the work done by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) Subject Codes Committee of which BNC is a member. And we represent you so there’s room for your involvement.

The purpose of my post today is to give you some insight on how a Subject Heading is created and how you can help us create one.

The 2011 BISAC Subject Codes

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) has released the annual update of BISAC Subject Codes. The BISG committee works hard to make sure the subjects keep up with the changing publishing market, adding and removing codes and refining code definitions. While most codes remain the same year-to-year, publishers should review the changes and update their coding for all active titles (front and backlist) if it’s changed.

We look at the subject areas with the most changes, and what you need to know about the BISAC Subject Codes update.

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Regional Differences

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I’m going to let you in on a little secret: BookNet Canada can produce regional bestseller lists in BNC SalesData. Yep. We could tell you what the top 10 nonfiction books are in British Columbia and they may not match up to Ontario’s top 10.

We currently only produce bestseller lists for the Canadian market as a whole. But with this new capability, things get a little more interesting. What will we find?

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Cracking Codes: New BISAC Subjects on BNC SalesData

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Maybe this isn’t code breaking Robert-Langdon-style, but the new BISAC code list that came out in November 2009 is reflected in BNC SalesData now.  After it was released, it was integrated into R.R. Bowker’s bibliographic database and then from Bowker into BNC SalesData around the middle of April.

Here is a refresher on why we use BISAC.