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

But supply chain metadata also includes commercial metadata: the price of the book, the date it's available for sale, perhaps things like sales territories and discounts. This also includes a lot of information the recipient (who is going to distribute or sell the book to an end user) needs to know. For physical books, the bookseller needs to know things like how many copies are in a carton, what the dimensions of the book are, how much it weighs. For ebooks, the metadata needs to convey information about file type, file size, and maybe even version.