Friday, August 14, 2009

Metadata Is Money

New "find at" links on book pages
Goodreads owes a debt of gratitude to Amazon for this, as you would not believe the price to purchase book meta-data from other sources.

Emphasis added by me.

There is a controversy over at GoodReads, which has had to change its linking policy due to Amazon's Terms of Service.

Amazon gets prime e-commerce positioning now.

One Commenter states:
Book publishers and distributors have failed to realize the importance of making free/ cheap book meta-data available thereby handing Amazon a near monopoly in this space. I will gladly pay a reasonable fee for good clean book meta-data.

Emphasis added by me.

Today, someone on Twitter I Blocked recently for abusing his position of trust denigrated my assertions about the value of metadata.

I guess some people never heard of R.R. Bowker.

2 comments:

Matthew said...

Could you maybe go into a little more detail w/this post. I get the basic idea, but the examples you cited don't really convince me of anything.

Mike Cane said...

You will have to continue reading as the idea develops.