IPA Endorses Thema

International Publishers Association Secretary General, Jens Bammel, has officially announced IPA's support of Thema, the new international subject category standard for books and e-books.

"With publishers everywhere keen to boost the 'discoverability' of their works, there is a growing realisation of the power of metadata to improve merchandising, sales and market intelligence. Subject classification of books and e-books is critical and given the increasingly international nature of the book trade, the need for a global scheme is clear: for too long, national divisions have been accepted as inevitable.

Thema aims to be global in scope, multi-cultural and multi-lingual, applicable to all parts of the book supply chain, and flexible enough to allow each market to retain its unique cultural voice, while remaining a unified and simple-to-adopt standard. I'm delighted that a number of IPA members are actively collaborating on Thema, which promises to solve problems for publishers. I fully endorse this initiative."

Resources and further details
Thema is managed by EDItEUR, the trade standards body for the global book trade which also manages ONIX for Books, EDItX and other metadata, identifier and e-commerce standards. EDItEUR is a not-for-profit membership-supported organization that works for the benefit of the global book trade. It has 100+ members in more than 20 countries around the world: The International Publishers Association is a charter member and is represented on the EDItEUR board.

The Thema section of the EDItEUR website is at http://www.editeur.org/151/Thema.