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

Publishers send out what are called "feeds" on a regular basis to all the retailers, distributors, aggregators, and other business partners they deal with. These feeds contain all the essential (and some non-essential) information about the books they have for sale. This information includes obvious things like the title of a book, the names of its authors, the publisher and imprint, perhaps the names of other contributors like illustrators or translators, and a host of other such bibliographic metadata, such as identifiers (ISBNs), which we'll get to later.