Standards, practices, and intelligence for professional publishing.
Independent guidance on publishing standards, copyright, ISBNs, metadata, book production, distribution, AI, and professional publishing practice.
Edition 005 covers 2027 readiness: ISBNs, DOI planning, metadata, accessibility, production, rights, and a practical ISNI companion guide.
Practical guidance for the legal, editorial, technical, production, and distribution systems behind a professionally published book.
Distribution & Metadata
Implement ISNI across books and imprints: verify contributor identities, reconcile backlist records, prevent duplicates, and deliver identifiers through ONIX.
Publishing
An October 31, 2026 audit of ISBNs, Crossref DOI fees, metadata, accessibility, AI policy, print production, and rights records.
AI & Publishing
Implement the Authors Guild’s October 2026 AI guidance with manuscript screening, author consent, confidentiality controls, a sample policy, and a review checklist.
Distribution & Metadata
Understand the EPUB 3.4 draft, test new features, validate with EPUBCheck 5.4.0, and decide what to change or preserve in existing ebooks.
Distribution & Metadata
W3C published a new EPUB Annotations 1.0 Working Draft on September 24, 2026. Publishers should preserve stable structure, identifiers, privacy expectations, and edition relationships before annotations become portable across reading systems.
Author & Publisher Business
KDP now allows Kindle eBook preorders up to 18 months in advance for preorders created on or after September 2, 2026. Use a release-control record to avoid long-range metadata and production errors.
Copyright & Rights
Anthropic settlement allocation disputes show why publishers need a title-level record for legal owners, beneficial owners, reversions, contracts, claim percentages, and payment decisions.
Distribution & Metadata
Google expanded Search profiles to more U.S. publishers and added multi-account management. Use this claiming, evidence, and governance standard before rolling it across a publishing network.
