ONIX 3.0
ONIX 3.0 is the book industry's standard format for product metadata — a structured file that describes a book to retailers, distributors, and libraries. It carries the title, contributors, description, subject codes, formats, identifiers such as ISBN, and pricing, so every system in the supply chain reads the same facts.
A useful way to think about ONIX: the EPUB is the product, and ONIX is the label on the box. Retail systems do not read your manuscript to decide how to list it — they read the metadata. Clean, complete ONIX is how a book ends up in the right category, with the right description, under the right author name, everywhere it is sold.
Self-publishing platforms often collect this information through web forms instead of asking for a raw ONIX file, but wider distribution — aggregators, library channels, international retailers — increasingly expects ONIX 3.0. Scribegrove's Publishing Studio generates an ONIX 3.0 record alongside your EPUB so the metadata travels with the book.