In this presentation, Kieron Smith, Digital Director at UK’s Blackwell’s & Wordery, shares insights into how they leverage the power of good metadata, from boosting discoverability to offering a seamless online search experience to their customers. Learn about the practical applications of Thema and discover why this subject classification system is richer, more browsable, and designed for how customers need the data presented today. Link to presentation slides and recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/give-them-what-they-need-a-case-study-of-what-retailers-can-accomplish-with-good-metadata/ Presented by BookNet Canada on June 8, 2023 with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.

1. Tim Middleton: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's Tech Forum session.
I'm Tim Middleton, product manager and retailer liaison at BookNet. Welcome to "Give
Them What They Need: A Case Study of What Retailers Can Accomplish with Good
Metadata." Before we get started, BookNet Canada would like to acknowledge that its
operations are remote, and their colleagues contribute their work from the traditional
territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Ojibwe of Fort William First Nation, the
Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi'Kmaq, and the Métis, the original
nations and peoples of the lands we now call, Beaton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder
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Now, let me introduce our speaker, Kieron Smith. We're all very excited to have Kieron with
us. He's a professional book seller with over 20 years book trade experience, including
WHSmith Retail, establishing the ottakars.co.uk website in 1999, heading up the web
offering at Bertelsmann's Book Clubs in the UK, and operations at Methven's Booksellers,
followed by three years outside the industry at Europe's leading video game website,
game.co.uk. Head of online for Waterstones in 2006-07, and then managing director of
international book seller, The Book Depository acquired by Amazon in 2011, for five years.
He joined the UK's leading independent book seller Blackwell's as digital director in 2015
until its acquisition by Waterstones in 2022, where he now runs both blackwells.co.uk and
wordery.com. Kieron is also a published author. His book, "The Politics of Down Syndrome"

2. by Zero Books published in 2011, and he has a PhD in Organisational Democracy from the
University of Winchester. Kieron, welcome, and please take us away.
Kieron Smith: Thank you very much for the introduction and thank you really for this
opportunity to talk about metadata, which comes up too infrequently, frankly. So, very, very
pleased to do that. And I'm gonna take you through what I'm gonna talk about today if I can
get this to work. There we go.
So, I'm gonna give you a little bit of an introduction. I'm gonna talk a little bit, just a very
little bit about Blackwell's and kind of the way in which we are approaching book selling.
And then set the scene a little bit more, and then take a step back, I think, and look at some
real-world examples. And I'm gonna pull out some specific titles to share with you and look
at the metadata of those and kind of what doesn't work there. And I'm not picking on any
particular publisher. It could apply to any publisher, big or small actually, but I've just chosen
some books that I think are interesting and give a good example of what I'm talking about.
And then really go on to talk about the opportunities that Thema offers because I do think
there are many, and I think it's a very collaborative opportunity for the trade as a whole, for
publishers and book sellers to be able to create something more than we have now. So,
without any more delay, I should go on.
Blackwell's has been around for a long time. It's been around since 1879. Obviously, I've not
been there the whole time, however long my career history sounded there. One thing that
Blackwell's didn't ever do was say no very well. So, it has sold trade titles. It became the
leading academic book seller. It's been a very significant mail order player. It's got its own
rare books department, secondhand, business to business, and business to institutions with
lots of universities as customers, the NHS, etc.
Now, what this has meant is that we've really got a vast range of different customers
globally. We've also got some very demanding customers, certainly colleagues, booksellers
in Oxford have to deal with dons from Oxford University who do expect you to kind of know
the answer. In fact, a colleague said to me once, "The internet is very useful, but I find it's
easier just to know things," which I thought was a great quote from a book seller, and that's
kind of what I think a good book seller is, is a repository of knowledge.
But sort of our aim is to do two things, I think, really. One is to create selections in shops and
to create a selection online that interests and inspires and meets the kind of objectives of
serendipity that you would expect from a book seller. But also, it's about discovery. And I
think Thema and metadata helps us achieve both things. It helps us create the lists and the
selection that we want, but it also gives us the context to help people discover new titles or
discover the titles that they want that are related to the interests that they have.
I tried to find a picture that represented how I felt everybody is in the book trade, and Buster
Keaton ended up taking that role. I think very much this and everything we are doing in
terms of structural changes in the business around metadata, around what we do online and
how we sell is, you know, we're on a moving train already. We are trying to change things as
they're already in flight. We've already got sort of big back lists that we always have to deal
with whilst trying to lay the track in front of us at the same time.

3. Now, there are good and bad things to this, I think. One is that although everything is in
motion and it's really hard to change anything at any point, it does mean that we are the
architects of our own future. And I think Thema has been around for nearly 10 years now. It
was launched in 2012 and I think it's been gathering steam, just to extend this metaphor. And
I think that there are more and more opportunities now for a global metabibliographic
structure, I suppose, that everybody can put into, and that can represent everybody's aims
around discoverability.
I'm gonna sort of go in and then pull back out again. When we talk about Thema, just to go to
the real basics, Thema I think is often represented as two distinct things, if you like. It's the
categories in terms of the traditional hierarchical tree depicted on the left here in terms of our
fiction and related items, fiction, general, and literary. Very hierarchical, very structured, we
know, we're very comfortable with it. It's something that the book trade, libraries, etc., have
all used for many, many years. And then we've got these blobs, these circles on the right-
hand side, which are the qualifiers, which are represented often as separate things. But I think
actually what's exciting about this is that it's far messier than that, and that it is really needs
to be munged together for us to be able to get the real power from this metadata. And as I
said, I'll try and bring this to life a bit because this is also very abstract at this point, and
what's useful is kind of visualising that and explaining it in more detail.
But before we go into that, I'm just gonna say the words discovery yet again, because I still
think this is a huge challenge for the book trade as a whole, whichever country you may be
in, wherever you're publishing, whichever audience you want to reach. And I think it's got
harder. I had a look actually to see what we had sold as a business online. And over the last
24 months, I've sold over 656,000 unique titles to 115 different countries. That's a lot of
different audiences, and different interests, and different titles in order that people had to
discover them in the first place. And some of those, I can flatter myself that as a group of
book sellers online, we were able to put things in front of people that they were excited by,
but other things people would've found through their own recommendations and things. And
I'm gonna touch on a little bit later how people do discover books currently and why better
metadata will help feed into that as well.
There are a lot of books out there, and we are publishing more and more every week. I've got
that quote there from... Well, the guesstimate, if you like, from Google, when they started
doing their scanning back in 2010, that there were around about 129 million unique titles.
Currently on our website, we've got around 18 million of those with live availability, which
is a very small overall percentage. I think a certain retailer, which I won't say out loud, it's a
bit like not mentioning certain characters from certain titles, but have got worse at this
because of the sheer volume of product, they've got worse because of the advertising that
they're selling within that, and the self-publishing that's feeding into that, and all the different
calls on people's attention and on the algorithms that they have within their own search.
What's interesting is, of course, we've got another element coming into this quite rapidly, and
I think they'll be able to share the link in the channel for everyone, in the presentation. But
Thad McIlroy published an article last week in "Publishers Weekly" with the in no way sort
of dramatic title "AI is About to Turn Book Publishing Upside Down." No presentation at the
moment would be complete without a mention of AI. Interestingly, within that article, he

4. says he believes that AI is gonna deliver on the till now thwarted promise of efficient
discovery. I mean, my fear actually is that it will do quite the opposite, is that we will have
more and more ChatGPT or AI co-authored or authored titles coming into large catalogues.
And if anything, it's gonna give us even more challenge about surfacing the titles that we
want to surface to customers, and for people to discover things on their own as well.
I think the internet certainly changed things. I think it's been a journey away from that
hierarchical tree in many different regards. I mean, this is a picture of Blackwell's back when
it first launched in 1995, but we've come a long way since then. You know, the cultural
context has changed. We're now in a world where this pure hierarchical product
classifications are just not sufficient to meet the audience. Themes, niches, identities are core
to our experience, and the experience of customers, and how we engage in discovery. I think
in a way we've got that long tail that Chris Anderson talked about a long time ago, but it's a
long tail of niches, and we've got to be able to help customers discover within those niches of
interest.
But the good news is all this data, all these opportunities, the building blocks are already
there. The industry is really, really good about having standards and about using the data and
structuring it in useful ways. Thema is a fantastically powerful tool, and I'm not being paid to
say this. I honestly believe it. But the industry needs to know the rules and needs to use it to
its full extent. It does come down to a point where there needs to be a critical mass in there.
And, you know, as I say, back to Buster Keaton, this is a moving train. If you look at
blackwells.co.uk today, for example, you won't see lots of use of qualifiers or anything
because the qualifier use upstream is not sufficient enough for me to be able to surface that
content and really share it with customers. We'll go on to show why I think that's really
important.
Okay. Right. Into the real detail now. There's nothing like a bit of ONIX to keep everyone
awake. Now, this is so a really great title, a history non-fiction title looking at East Germany
during the Cold War. What have we got in that data? Well, we've got qualifiers, so that's
great. So, the publisher has submitted some. And we've got Thema subjects. So, the Thema
subject codes very much the classical hierarchical tree. And we've got three of those in there.
Now, the qualifiers really repeat what's in the classification subject tree. So, we've got
Eastern Europe, which is a little bit of a narrowing down from European history. And then
we've got 20th Century 1900 to 1999. We've got some elements in here, Cold War. So, it's
not bad, it's not in a terrible place, but it could be better.
We end up like most retailers utilising, at this point, the primary classification from the first
one on the list, basically, so European history. Not great. That's a very large bucket. What the
publisher could have done is added some qualifiers to this, utilising... I mean, for example,
you could narrow it right down to the Cold War period using a time period qualifier. And
you could even go to East Germany, so you could say East Germany during the Cold War
period. As you can see, that's brought us right down.
Now, the really fantastic thing about qualifiers, and you think about the way that I kind of
put the circles on top of the hierarchy is if you're interested in East Germany and you're
interested in the Cold War period, and you want to look beyond the hierarchy where you've

5. ended up in this history bucket, you know, you may well be interested in philosophers from
Eastern Germany or fiction, architecture, but they all sit in very different parts of the
hierarchical tree quite correctly. I'll come back to that in a minute. But the qualifiers give us
the ability to say, "Well, actually I'm interested in other broader things within East
Germany," and they can coexist at the same time.
And I think this is where it starts to get really powerful because our interaction with real
human customers is that they come in and they say, "Well, I'm doing a project on East
Germany, or I'm reading about East Germany, or, you know... What other titles could you
give me?" And it's, you know, most book sellers like the quote I had from Peter at the
beginning saying, "Well, I know things," there is only so much we can know, unfortunately. I
can probably recommend 3 or 4 titles on East Germany, but actually, if I had access to a load
of qualifiers, I would be able to take a list of 20 and then perhaps recommend 5 rather than
just the 2 or 3 I remembered.
Now, the other issue at the moment is that we find publishers will use the hierarchical tree in
order to try and get their books in front of other audiences rather than using the qualifiers.
So, and I say I'm not picking on a particular publisher at all, this is very common. My little
highlights moved a bit there, so apologies for that. I've taken here part of the hierarchical
tree, which is the Cold Wars and proxy conflicts which is down here. And we've wandered
into having a couple of books completely mis-shelved because that's a non-fiction category,
yet I've got "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" here and a book by Heather Morris as well. Yeah, I
can see the connection and perfect for a qualifier, not history titles. And if you wandered into
a physical bookshop and found them in history, I think you'd probably question the expertise
of the book seller, unfortunately standing behind the till.
And again, shows the opportunity and shows that there's a desire to have those books there
and to reach those audiences, but this isn't the right way to do it. And that's where we start to
get into the real power actually, is to look at these drops of data properly as one big picture in
order to connect with people, because that's what we do, and that's what the industry does.
This is where it gets really interesting. There is a huge amount of demand out there. I mean,
I've chosen one tweet here from an author, Victoria Scott, who's written some books
featuring characters who have disability saying, "Oh, I'm gonna write a letter. I'm gonna have
this demand on Amazon to have a specific category within fiction that has characters with a
disability." Great. There's a demand for that absolutely. We can come back to that in more
detail in a second. It already exists, but because it's not being populated further upstream,
book sellers, whether they be Amazon or anyone else, aren't able to fill a new bucket or a
new lens, if you like, on that data.
Now we come to the truth. I've tricked you all to come to this presentation so I can show you
a picture of my daughter with a book on her head. So, Tanzi here, who's kindly posed for me
with "The Good Hawk." Now, she was very keen to have a fiction title with a protagonist
who had Down Syndrome as she has Down Syndrome herself, and it's almost impossible to
find. I did ask ChatGPT this question and it made up some books, completely fabricated the
titles and the authors, which was quite impressive to try to get away with that. Within the
category notations for interest qualifiers, if we go into category five here. So, this is the
interest qualifier right at the top, if you can see my mouse. And then we drill down 5PMK,

6. we've got so much detail here that we can actually say relating to people with Down
Syndrome. And that would've been perfect for this title because the... Sorry, because the lead
title and lead character, the protagonist in "The Good Hawk" is a girl with Down Syndrome.
You would be hard pressed to find that out from even the synopsis, actually.
I ran through this presentation with a few of my colleagues as well, and they said, "Well, is
there a concern, do you think from publishers that you might classify your book in some way
that would reduce the audience?" And I don't think that is the case at all, because again, if
you think about you've got the hierarchical tree, but you've also got these additional lenses of
the qualifiers on top of it. Your book still sits within, you know, fiction for young adults in
this case, but then there are other interests you can add on top. I wanna talk about how many
of those to perhaps think about in a moment. But I think it just broadens that scope because
otherwise you're just in that very narrow position. And I've kind of answered that question on
there. 5AZ. I've kind of touched on this one, so I'm gonna skip over that.
Another example. If you were a trainee occupational therapist, for example, and you were
looking for books on the accessible design of household objects, you can, currently, you're
wandering to product design, solid category, such a solid category, it's up 20,000 books in
that category. But unless you add a qualifier, you're really, really gonna struggle to drill
down on that. There is one relating to people with mobility or physical disabilities
impairments. So, we're taking a very similar... We're taking that five-interest qualifier and
applying it to a different part of the hierarchical tree, 5PMB, so we can then start to surface
titles like "The Design of Everyday Things."
I mean, I've literally, I've chosen one of the qualifiers to drill into a bit with those, the interest
qualifiers starting with five. And I mean, I think they can be particularly crucial to the way
that books are merchandised and promoted. And I said, "By the way, all Y codes," so all
children's codes, "need at least one A* qualifier." So, interest age. So, what's the age group
that you're aiming at? And if it's an educational title, what's the educational level qualifier?
And again, this is far more broad in scope than just saying, okay, well, if I was here for
example, is to say, oh, this book is appropriate for key stage four because key stage four
means nothing outside of the UK or even England, actually.
But if you've put these educational levels in using the qualifier, it's automatically translated
through Thema to the appropriate country's educational level so that if we get enough of this
data, you could be in Germany or you could be in Canada, or you could be in Mexico, and
you could be able to filter based on the correct qualifier for your location. And, you know,
we've got international diasporas all over the place now who want to know what their
particular qualifier would be, and we're not really providing that. And I think we're letting
customers down on that front at the moment.
Yeah, what's the balance? Because you could also get carried away here and go, "Oh, it's
great for this and this and this." And we see this coming out in different parts of the metadata
now. Today I had to delete a subtitle on a title which had been put in to say, you know, "This
is particularly relevant to," which is not appropriate for a subtitle obviously. But the right
balance, and I'm suggesting here, this is really following the Thema guidelines sort of
maximum of four subject codes for a title. Again, you don't want it in too many of these, the

7. Standard Tree, that's probably what you do now. And then for the qualifiers, probably not
more than six.
So, just kind of following... Think about those audiences and think about how it might be
surfaced and used. And I know that's really hard at the moment because hardly any retailers,
if any, are using the full qualifiers or even part of the qualifiers, but I think that's something
that, again, we can build together. And I think, again, that's quite an exciting opportunity
talking to a travel publisher here in the UK, for example, and saying, "Well, actually, if we
had all of the very specific location qualifiers available, we could even put their titles onto a
map so people could explore them in a different way and look at it from a geographical
perspective first."
So, what do customers do now? I thought this might be useful to just kind of check back to
see what they're doing. Because as I've got here, personally, I feel browsing online is pretty
underwhelming because there are so many titles, the filters are not as good as they could be.
And I'm totally applying this to what we do as well. There's loads more potential to make
that more useful. But a lot of customers do browse. We've got just over half searching for
books that they know. Not a massive surprise. But browse is up there, it's greater than search,
65%. And we've just repeated this survey data now because this data was from 2021, and you
can see the comparison to 2020. The new data coming in now is almost identical, so that
hasn't moved.
Now, I can recognise that the graph that's on the right-hand side is not very readable. When it
comes around you'll be able to blow it up a little bit. Really, this is asking the question, "In
the past year, have you bought a book on the strength of?" And then people... There aren't
many surprises here really, but the top one there is recommendations from a friend, got
newspaper reviews. Second hand's an interesting one. I think that's probably people trying it
because it's quite cheap. Social media recommendations, book seller recommendations, quite
high there at 36%, and then you're into special editions and, "I bought things because they
look really lovely." I think because browse is so high, again, this shows the opportunity that
we've got to push forward on getting greater conversion because we can surface the right sort
of books to the right customers.
And this isn't just an online piece. Book sellers in our shops, in the independent shops that I
talk to all the time are always making lists. I'm in a book sellers association group on
Facebook, and you can guarantee every single day there will be another book seller asking a
question, "Does anybody have some example titles for this particular customer, or this age
group, or this type of theme?" Or, "I'm not an expert in X, can anyone suggest some titles?"
And they just don't have access to this data outside of the tree at the moment.
Blackwell's itself has quite a few NHS customers, and for them, every single month our
account team will put together four NHS surgeons, for example, a list of new titles that are
very specific to a very expert field. And we have to do that by building up lists from the
publisher and looking AIs, and looking at all the data we can find. And again, this would
really make that very helpful. Not internet. Surgeons are not using the internet every day to
search for these books. They need us to be able to do that. Super important, obviously,
because it literally could save lives.

8. So, in summary, really, using Thema well is an opportunity to have better bookshops, giving
power to bookshops to use it to serve their customers. There are other spinoffs as well, and
I'd be really interested to hear your views in the questions at the end. And just in terms of
how you see opportunities, because I will only see opportunities from my point of view, but I
think the book trade is far broader than that.
One thing that we discovered when we moved some of our biblio data from one provider to
another is that we started to go up the search rankings in Google. And the reason for that, we
kind of...it was just a happy spin-off. We weren't expecting it. Was that the data was
different, because if everybody is using the same standard biblio for everything and just
presenting it in the same way, so the same synopsis, same type of presentation, same
categorisation and tree, is that Google gets a bit tired of that actually, and it just thinks,
"Okay, well, it's another repeat, another repeat."
So, actually, I think again, there's an opportunity here to surface beyond the bookshops
themselves into Google and other search engines where you could say, "Well, I'm gonna
filter this as a particular bookshop that's interested in books for children or whatever," and it's
to be able to have your own custom hierarchy there. That's quite a lot of work perhaps for an
independent, but even for the bigger players, there are again, opportunities. I'm gonna say
opportunities and discoverability quite a lot, but I do think it is something that will make
quite a big difference to the industry.
I've touched on some of the international nature of Thema. We are very international. Sign
up on Blackwell's and, you know, sign up to our emails and you'll get a sense of that, I think.
It's a way, you know, and I've talked about the key stage stuff already, but I think, again, that
international perspective would be really enhanced by having the qualifiers in there as well.
So, I've rattled through a lot of that. Onto the last couple of slides.
Now, I hope you've got an inkling from my enthusiasm for metadata. Usually, these, when
people do come to metadata talks they're quite self-selected, so I assume that you're probably
doing something within the industry in that regard. But as I said right at the beginning, it
does need that kind of critical mass. We can all do something about this within our own roles
in the industry. I need you to join me in getting new converts to this particular cause and also
inputting into Thema itself. There may be things that are significant, are missing. You know,
there are national sets. I don't know the Canadian Thema tree or anything like that
unsurprisingly, but you'll be much closer to that, and you'll be able to input and suggest
things that can be changed and help it develop, because it's very much, it needs to be organic
and it needs to be kind of democratic across the industry, really.
So, to summarise, Thema is a powerful tool which can enable people across the industry to
truly deliver on the promise of delivery. Judicious use of both subject category, four if you
must, and qualifiers up to six, can expand the audience for your titles, or if you're a book
seller, help you find them in the first place. Successful management of metadata on titles is a
crucial part of ensuring a title is successful and only going to get more important, especially
with AI coming down the road. Thank you very much for your time. I much appreciate it.

9. Tim: Thank you so much Kieron for that presentation. Really appreciate it. And I'd like to
invite a colleague of mine, Tom Richardson. He's BookNet's bibliographic manager and
Canada's national Treasurer for ONIX data. And so, I'm just gonna get Tom to join us to
provide us with a Canadian perspective on this too. And we do have some questions. So, I'm
gonna feed the first question to you, Tom, and just sort of get you to give a sort of brief
synopsis about the North American market and its readiness for Thema, just to help give
Kieron some orientation around that for us.
Tom Richardson: Yeah. It's not pretty. The North American market doesn't support Thema
very much, and I'm not aware of any retailer when focused in it, actually using Thema in it.
Now, Kobo might be an exception on that. There is interest including plans for Indigo.
Amazon uses Thema in Europe, but not here. And as usual, publishers in North America are
mainly inspired by use, but Canadian publishers are much more likely to support Thema, and
U.S. publishers are much less likely.
There is good news and I think this will be changing, as I have heard within committees.
Members of at least some of the big five U.S. publishers state plans to support Thema in their
data here as soon as next year. And I believe most or all already support it internationally.
But practically speaking, for now, in a database like BiblioShare representing the North
America market, we would have around 15% to an optimistic 20% of the data with Thema.
That doesn't tempt retailers, and the lack of adoption by retailers feeds the belief that BISAC
is the only option. And just as an editorial comment, publishers really do have to lead to gain
adoption of anything. So, thank you.
Tim: Thanks, Tom. That actually leads really well into the next question that we have here.
And maybe this is more for Kieron, I guess. How much, or maybe how little of the market
needs to support Thema before you think a retailer could implement a system like
Blackwell's?
Kieron: Yeah, that's an interesting one and really hard to answer. I think in a way, you could
have, if you had some significant players even within a particular... You know, so if you had
a group of children's publishers, for example, who really took this on and said, "We're gonna
make sure that all the age qualifiers are there in the first instance." And I think it is moving
that direction. I can see children's being the leaders in this actually, and we get to implement
those first, and then that would be a really useful demonstration to other people what the
value would be.
I think because it's a compulsory set. I mean, despite it being compulsory, obviously, it's not
fully coming through from everybody as yet, but I think we will see that certainly over the
next 12 to 18 months, which so I'm hoping we'll be able to have that live over that period and
then be working with the publishers who aren't doing it to be able to say, "Well, look, it's a
bit sort of like your peers are doing this and you are not," at that stage and that's an easier in.
I think within the broad trade or academic categories, that's going to be harder perhaps to get
that immediate critical mass, but you only need a couple of the larger publishers to start
doing it. You couldn't just have one, obviously, because your qualifier would make you look
like a poor book seller if you started to expose it. But I think within children's will be a good
start.

10. Tim: That's a really good answer. Thank you. Anything to add, Tom? Okay. Next question is
what can publishers do? What sort of consideration should they make to improve their
Thema to make it work better for you? And maybe it's the opposite, what sort of things really
make it hard? So, I think you've definitely spoken to this, but maybe we wanna reiterate it.
Kieron: Well, putting it in the wrong classification is gonna be quite bad. Yes, that's some
sort of cardinal sin I think for book selling, unfortunately. Yeah, so please don't do that. I
think dip your toe in the water and experiment would be good. I have very, very few, I could
count on two or three fingers, publishers approach me to say, "I've put some qualifiers in.
How do they look from your perspective? Are they useful?" I think this needs to be more
collaborative. I think if book sellers just say to publishers, "You have to do this," and kind of
we wave our arms in the air and complain, then I don't think that's gonna get us very far. But
I think if we start to work together and people see benefits, then, you know, going back to
that kind of children's discussion again, it's going to be a self-fulfilling, you know, get better
and better and we can improve it together. So, more conversations is probably what
publishers can do to start with. And if they're concerned there are other people in the
industry, you know, Thema and Editor, and I'm sure Tom will be able to say, you know,
whether BookNet also will be very happy to help on that front, I'm sure.
Tim: Tom, maybe I can just get you to add what you might think some of the biggest
obstacles are for North American publishers to make that transition to Thema.
Tom: Well, I mean, I think, well, one, the lack of adoption by retailers which this is kind of
the big stumbling block. And, you know, the retailers not having enough data to which, you
know, what Kieron said was all extremely useful. I think the only thing I could basically do
is really stress is that I think both publishers do need to experiment, and they do need to
communicate about what they're trying to do to the retailers. So, a publisher who's using
Thema and, you know, gained some knowledge of it, with an expectation of how it might be
used, should try and take any opportunity they have to talk to a retailer about that, just to let
them know that this exists, and this should allow them to do something with it. And that
would be probably helpful. I mean, even just documenting a few, you know, key selling
points, books, that type of thing just may help, you know, get them thinking about it a bit
more. They want to do a better job and they don't feel they have the tools. And giving them
the better tools should inspire them to want to use them even if it isn't on a broad base yet.
Kieron: One thing I was gonna ask actually, so one of the pressures coming in here is the
sun-setting of the BIC scheme in February, 2024. And I think people are starting to feel that's
coming a bit closer, and the move to ONIX 3 as well, whether or not there is that feeling of
pressure at all in Canada around the closing of BIC or any of those schemes.
Tom: There's virtually no use of BIC here, so it never has been...
Kieron: Are you sure whether there was an equivalent kind of sun-setting of anything?
Tom: Well, no. It's somewhat the reverse. Initially when Thema first came out, there was an
expectation that, you know, there would be an industry shift to it away from the BISG
BISAC subject titlings. And instead, there's been a re-entrenchment of BISAC, and it's

11. undergoing quite a lot of rapid development to, I would call it Themamise itself to make it
more useful. Which, I don't know, I have private opinions on, which I won't go into here.
But so, there's not a similar sort of thing. I mean, there is the whole transition from ONIX 2.1
to 3.0 problem, which largely we've done. I mean, we have transitioned to 3.0 in the main. I
mean, Amazon basically made us do it and, you know, it was done. So, that part is less of an
issue, although the question would be how good is the ONIX 3.0? It gets down to, like, even
when I talk about the maybe 20% of Thema, how well has it done? I mean, there's really not
much use of qualifiers here, which I understand was always one of the big problems with
BIC is, you know, it had these potential qualifiers without much use of them and things like
that. And I can certainly see all that in the Thema here that we don't make as much use of
them as we do.
And maybe just to you as a professional, you might think some of this stuff looks like
somebody did a database, you know, crosswalk between another subject coding system. You
can go online at the BookNet Canada website and actually get a BISAC to Thema crosswalk.
So, and that often is what drives the Thema use here.
Tim: Great. That actually did answer a question that we had further down, so way to go way.
Way to read the minds of the audience. Our next question is, "In addition to Google ranking
Blackwell's higher in search results, was there any other surprising consequence of adopting
Thema?" Kieron.
Kieron: I mean, it certainly helped with sort of manual lists. The sad thing is I think we've
only sort of tapped 10% of its power at this point. So, I'm more in anticipation of all the
exciting things that will come down the line if we could persuade enough people, enough
publishers to kind of join us on this journey. In a way, what's quite helpful is that being
bought by Waterstones means that now I'm working with a broader set of colleagues across a
broader set of retail brands in order to take this forward. And that is the plan is for
Waterstones and for Foyles and Pub Charts, and all the other companies in the group to kind
of get behind the opportunities in Thema. And that gives more power to my book selling
elbow.
Tim: Can I ask what other things you expect to see?
Kieron: I mean, it's also, it's very much a collaborative piece with other book sellers and my
colleagues in terms of... Because what I love about them is that everyone's got their own
different passions and they'll come up with great ways of using it that I won't see. You know,
I mean, and that's the kind of exciting opportunity there, I think. So, I'm hoping, I'm
expecting to be surprised, let's see, is the answer to that.
Tim: That's fair. We'll have you back.
Kieron: Yes. Perhaps with a group of my other book sellers.
Tim: Our next question, "Can you speak to the value of other metadata elements such as
comp titles, excerpt, table of contents, author biographies, series description, EPUB

12. accessibility, metadata, prizes, awards, and more? Will this metadata be shown on your
website?"
Kieron: Well, all metadata is hugely important. I think different websites will value different
sets of metadata in different ways. I could have spent an hour talking about how important
jacket images and dimension data is actually. You'd be surprised how poor dimension data
can be. And for an online retailer, that's super important for me to know what size packet is
gonna go in and how much it's gonna cost me to post it, let alone things like synopsis.
Things like excerpt tables. We use some of that more within the academic set,
unsurprisingly. So, academics are very interested in that. So, again, I think it's kind of
taking... Being a good book seller is looking at the metadata that you have and then tailoring
that for the particular audience that you want to. You don't put too much in front of a trade
buyer, for example, if you're buying romantic fiction. I mean, I'm generalising, but you don't
necessarily want to busy the page full of lots of things. You might wanna read the first
couple of pages, and we've got accessible extracts on the website for a lot of trade titles now.
At least a million, I think. And that's really useful.
What we've found is that they're particularly favoured by science fiction readers for some
reason. Often in a series, they wanna read the first couple of pages. And debut authors, again,
that's really, really useful for people to get an idea. So, again, it's thinking about the
particular audiences and the particular metadata that they might find helpful. We don't sell e-
books, so I can't talk to EPUB. And so, we use an EPUB extract for some of the extracts, but
other than that, we're analog only on that front.
Tim: This is sort of a personal question of mine. It's not on our list, but I am curious what
that process looks like for you to sort of try out supporting new metadata. How do you roll
that out into all your assets? Do you have stakeholders like a test group, stuff like that? And
how long does it take?
Kieron: Well, actually, I'm very distrustful of third-party tools because I like to think book
selling is different often, and I don't think the things that we want to do really fit with other
retail tools very easily. So, we've built a lot of this stuff ourselves. We've built a catalog
management system. So, actually, we're quite agnostic about some of the feeds that we get.
So, you know, we would rather get an availability rather than worry about whether what
form of ONIX it's in, for example. And then we will deal with that further down the line. But
we're very quick to test staff and see. So, getting the extracts in, you know, if it's our own
application, then it's just us having to do it. So, we just prioritise on that basis.
We are not very... Well, I was gonna say we're not very good at testing it with the audience.
We have quite a vocal audience. I think they let us know quite quickly whether they like
things and they don't like things. And we have the nice thing about being a multi-channel
retailer is also they will often come into the shop and say, "I saw this on your website, and
this is what I thought." That doesn't work for our global audience, obviously, but again,
they're very communicative. And, yeah, so that's part of the fun of what we do, I think, and
just experimenting with customers rather than kind of selecting, and trying it direct and
getting their feedback.

13. Tim: Now back to the script. Is there any editorialising that takes place on Blackwell's side?
Do you ever work backwards and edit publisher data that you feel is missing content? Oh,
that's an interesting idea.
Kieron: Sometimes, but I think the sheer scale of it is difficult when you've got 18 million
titles. Where we're featuring something in a promotion, we will sometimes edit data,
certainly to clean it up to make sure that it's... But that's not very scalable. I've got two
content editors. There's only so much we can kind of do in a day. So, the more publishers can
do to help us along that journey would be appreciated.
Tim: Great. So, again, for Kieron. Oh, this is a question from you, Tom. So, in describing the
East Germany books, did you mean to say that publishers shouldn't mix fiction and non-
fiction subject codes? That's coming from Tom Richardson. No privacy here.
Kieron: You should never put a non-fiction title into a fiction category and vice versa. That's
where the qualifiers come in. "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" shouldn't be in history, definitely.
Tim: Is that the question or?
Tom: Yeah, that is. And okay, I think I misunderstood where the Cold War was set.
Kieron: So, Cold War qualifier, absolutely.
Tom: Still, it does seem to me that, I mean, if the main subject was fiction, then wouldn't it
be better to have a toggle that sort of, like, filtered it? Because sometimes you do wind up
flavouring an anarchist sort of technology related sci-fi thing. There might be a technology
code that fits it really well and really places it.
Kieron: I mean, there are always some exceptions. Obviously, I'm being quite... But again,
this is where the qualifiers add the real value, I think.
Tom: This is sort of useful for me. I think just the fact that it's very ambiguous, but it's just, it
contradicts some of the instructions that have been given to the Canadian publishers. So,
good. It's I'm glad to hear that. I think that answers the question. Thank you.
Kieron: Yeah. We certainly think of a hierarchical tree, that element of it as physical, you
know, think of it as physical bookshelves in a bookshop. To that degree, like I said, you
wouldn't go to the history category in the bookshop and go, "Oh, John McAra [SP] is in
here." Although you can see the kind of the thought process that got you there, it's still in the
wrong category. Maybe that one's quite black and white to me, I think. If you had a set of
bookshelves that said the Cold War, and all things about the Cold War, which you might put
on a table at the front of the store, then that would be fine, and that's your kind of qualifier.
Tom: What you're sort of saying is it's more useful to you to have the geography code of
East Germany, the time code of, like, the Cold War period definitely, than it is to have the
history marker.
Kieron: Yeah. I mean, history's an important part of that as well, but those are the things that
finesse your kind of where it is in the first place.

14. Tom: Okay, thank you.
Tim: And just a sort of spinoff from that, since you referred to shelves in the bookstore
versus online, how closely do you align your categorisation within bricks and mortar versus
online? Is that just a very divergent way of looking at them?
Kieron: I'm not sure. I'm not sure I know the answer to that question.
Tim: Okay.
Kieron: I shall write that down because, yeah, I mean, it varies. For us, for Blackwell's it
varies a lot by the bookshop because some of our bookshops are very tiny. If you go to XT
University, it's probably not much bigger than this room, but then Oxford Broad Street is
huge and five floors and whatever. But each one of those shops is very tailored to its
particular market. So, I say Oxford is kind of serving the university as much as anything. It
will have over the years created classifications in there, which are unique to that shop and
unique to that audience. I think it's gonna be quite different, would be my guess to the online
categories. Whether that's correct or not, I don't know. I'd like to see our online categories
evolve a bit more actually over the next 12 to 24 months. Sometimes using Thema,
sometimes not, sometimes just using things that we think will be useful categories for our
customers.
Tim: Thank you. I think it's 2:58. I think we have time for one more question. And I have
one more question. So, how would you explain why publishers are not investing in an
efficient cataloguing system and experts, as discovery is not only advertising and marketing,
metadata is not a technical thing, but a marketing thing?
Kieron: I think definitely whoever's asked that question should shout that from the rooftops
because I think that's probably...
Tim: One of yours, Tom?
Kieron: Probably one of the misconceptions is that it's just part of a technical process rather
than being exactly that, rather than being the marketing and surfacing of your title. So,
absolutely.
Tim: Tom, you wanna weigh in on that one?
Tom: Well, just to emphasise that it was part of Kieron's presentation, you know, like about
the collaborative nature of the metadata between the publisher and the retailer is part of that.
I mean, it's not a simple thing. That's all.
Tim: Okay. Well, that's all the time we have. So, thank you very much, Kieron. We hope to
have you back again. And thank you, Tom. And I do have to say, before we go, we'd love if
you could provide feedback on this session. We'll drop a link to the survey in the chat. Please
take a couple minutes to fill it out. We'll also be emailing you a link to a recording of this
session as soon as it's available. And lastly, we'd like to thank the Department of Canadian
Heritage for their support through the Canada Book Fund. And thanks to all of you for

15. attending. And especially, thank you, Kieron. We know it's late. We know you gotta get
home.
Kieron: It's a pleasure. Thank you.
Tim: Thank you so much.