The BookSmarts Podcast, with Joshua Tallent
Arts:Books
Standards are an important driving force in every civilization. Standards help us all agree on how we define things, and provide opportunities for us to more effectively engage with each other in trade and in other ways.
There is an interesting article in Science Magazine about how traders in the ancient Near East and Europe, during the Bronze Age, developed standardized weights and measures over time that allowed them to more easily trade goods with people from other parts of the world. The process of creating these standardized weights took place over a long period of time, but the weights are surprisingly consistent despite the time and distance.
Standardization is much more complex today, and we now have international standards for weights like the kilogram. The Kilogram standard was developed in 1799, and a single cylinder of platinum-iridium that resides in Paris, France, has been used since 1889 as the internationally-recognized standard for a kilogram of mass. That changed in 2019, when scientists and governments around the world defined the Kilogram instead based on a newly defined value of Planck's Constant, in a process that took many years and many scientific experiments to define. Veritasium has an interesting video about this process.
All of this really leads to the point of this episode: standards are important. There is a lot of work being done in the publishing industry to define and update standards for things like BISAC subject codes, EPUB, ISBN, and ISNI. There are committees and working groups (especially at BISG) that discuss these standards, discuss best practices, and help the publishing industry advance.
I highly encourage you to get involved with these organizations and join the committees that are developing and discussing these standards. More voices are always welcomed, and your unique input is needed.
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/booksmarts/messageEpisode 23: Mark Herschberg How Books Might Escape the Page
Episode 22: George Slowik, Jr. on the 150th Anniversary of Publishers Weekly
Episode 21: Thad McIlroy on Metadata Quality, the Backlist, and more
Episode 20: Todd Sattersten on The Magic Number
Episode 19: Scott Miller on Publishing at FranklinCovey
Episode 18: Robin Whitten on Audiobook Demographics and Quality
Episode 17: Fran Toolan on Cybersecurity
Episode 16: Nick Espinosa on Cybersecurity
Episode 15: Updates on Keywords and Reviews
Episode 14: Mary McAveney on Book Discovery
Episode 13: Alessandra Torre on Indie Author Strategies that Publishers Can Use
Episode 12: Michael Cader on Challenges and Opportunities in Publishing
Episode 11: Recent Kindle Changes: A+ Pages and the Death of the MOBI Format
Episode 9: Erik Nelson on Branding and Marketing
Episode 8: Everything You Wanted to Know About Keywords
Episode 7: Andy Hunter on the Role of Independent Bookstores and the Need for Innovation
Episode 6: Clay Tablets and Metadata Overwriting
Episode 5: Ian Lamont on Advertising and Direct-to-Consumer Sales
Episode 4: Drs. Rachel Noorda and Kathi Inman Berens on Book Discovery
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