The October 23 ComicsPRO Open House included a discussion of the current status of the COMET comics metadata standard and how the demise of Diamond has brought the situation into sharper focus. The panel was moderated by Katie Pryde, ComicsPRO Director of Special Projects and owner of Books With Pictures in Portland, OR.
ComicsPRO’s working group on metadata has spent the past three years developing a standard format for comics data in order to streamline ordering and record-keeping (see “ComicsPRO: Metadata Project Update”).
One immediate need in the post-Diamond world is series codes, which formerly were provided by Diamond and are not really used by book distributors. “Those were incredibly important for manga in particular,” said Morgan Perry, Marketing Manager for Square Enix Manga and Books, “because they really made it easier for people to order series or keep subscriptions going forward.”
“If manga are comics, and comics need to be ordered with a series code, then manga should also be ordered with a series code,” Perry said, “especially with a lot of comic shops wanting to expand or build new manga sections in their stores.”
“I am just straight up missing manga volume ordering,” Pryde said. “There are volumes that I have not ordered, even though I’ve had subscribers for them for years, and now I don’t have the code, and I just miss it.” She suggested that manga publishers look over their data to see if there was a drop in sales over the summer.
Of the major distributors, Penguin Random House Publisher Services (PRHPS) has made the most progress toward adopting the standard. “We have sample files from Penguin available now,” said Django Bohren of Comic Shop Assistant, “and they’re doing a really good job of mapping their existing stuff. There’s a few things that don’t map perfectly, but none of them are the required fields that we really need in order to describe what a widget is.” Bohren also spoke to PRHPS about series codes. “We had a really good conversation about why it’s necessary and why theirs don’t quite work,” he said. “Comics are so different than books. The way they do it for books is great. The way we do it for comics is totally different.”
“Series codes really should come from the publisher up to the distributor,” Brian Garside of Manage Comics pointed out, “because that series code should be the same whether you’re distributing through Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Lunar, anybody. If our publishers were maintaining their own series codes, it would make this a lot simpler.”
In terms of distributor adoption, only PRHPS is sending COMET files on a weekly basis, Bohren and Garside said. “Lunar is still working on theirs,” Bohren said, “and I haven’t heard a ‘No, we’re not going to do that’ from Simon & Schuster or HarperCollins.” Universal may also sign on in the future.
Despite the advances that have been made, the data still is not consistent across publishers and distributors, so it still has to be adjusted by hand for POS systems such as Manage Comics and Comic Shop Assistant.
“I think that the ultimate goal is for the data to come to us correct, and not for us to be imposing our own biases on it,” Garside said. “In my opinion, the data should come to us clean, and then all we’re doing is aggregating it and tying together distributor codes to specific products. That’s the end, the beautiful, shining end goal that I would love to see.”
The need remains. “We were really hoping to get ahead of what I think we all saw was a coming collapse of Diamond data,” Pryde said, “and we didn’t. We are in the post-Diamond world without a coherent data source, and it sucks.” What had been a theoretical problem became a very real one in her own store. “I personally felt a shift from ‘I need to figure out how to fix this for the industry’ to ‘I need to be able to I need to figure out how to fix this in my database,’” she said, “like, ‘I need my store to stop being broken’ became more pressing than ‘I need the industry to have a reliable solution.’”
Bohren encouraged retailers to speak up. “Tell your distributor and your publisher that you’d like to see them supplying COMET files for everybody,” he said. “This is such a nerdy, boring topic, and you may not even know where the problem is coming from. As a comic book retailer, I can almost guarantee it, no matter what system you’re using, this is causing some pain points.”
Source: ICv2
