Information exchange for the book industry in Norway

Abstract

The book industry in Norway consists of many different types of companies. We have the publisher who publishes the book, the Distribution Central who distributes the book from the publisher to the book store and the book store who sell the book to the customer. There are also several other company types like the National Library, the Norwegian Library Bureau and the Arts Council Norway that belong to the book industry, but in this thesis I will mainly focus on how the exchange of book information is between the publisher, Distribution Central and the book store.

In order to learn how the information exchange is today and uncover problem areas with this solution, I interviewed seven companies from different parts of the book industry. Several problem areas were uncovered from the interviews.

One of the problem areas was concerning the lack of standard when the publisher send book information to the book store through the Distribution Central or any other company that requests book information. Since there are agreements between the sender and receiver how the information should be sent and that company use various format and structure, makes the information exchange ineffective and time consuming.

I will therefore explore whether the book industry should adopt a standard format for exchanging information and how this could be done. There exist today an international standard for information exchange. I will therefore look into how this standard works, and how the book information sent using this standard could be stored in a database.