Welcome to the Metadata Millennium: A Complete Overview of What Metadata Can Do for Publishers

The importance of metadata goes beyond books and magazines. It's increasingly essential to all media: print, ebooks, images, videos, blogs, and all the rest of the content we produce. It's what makes it all work together.

Supply Chain Metadata: It's How Books Are Sold
Let's start with the metadata publishers are most aware of: supply chain metadata. You see some of this metadata every time you go online to buy a book. Pretty much everything you see except the cover and the preview pages is metadata.