🔖 Solutions · Books & publishing

Books & publishing: paperback, hardcover, collector, audio — one title

Three hardback books pressed side by side, seen edge-on: yellowed paper, blue headbands, one barcode label.

Two editions of the same novel share the same title and have two different ISBNs. Your customers sometimes search for one, sometimes the other.

One title, four distinct products

A bookstore catalog stacks several axes — title, author, genre, format, edition, language (the detail of each attribute). The same work exists in paperback, hardcover, collector's, and audio: four products, four prices, one title. Indexing just one of these axes misses half the searches.

ISBN, format and edition untangled

The livres rule pack activates when you pick this industry, at indexing time. It produces these annotations, each becoming a usable filter:

AnnotationWhat it isolates
ISBN_9782070413119the isolated ISBN, with or without hyphens
FORMAT_POCHEthe format — pocket, paperback, hardcover, illustrated, audio
GENRE_POLARthe genre, nine families from crime to poetry
ED_COLLECTORthe special edition — collector, bilingual, annotated
LANG_ENthe book's language, original and translated

The nine genres run from crime to poetry, by way of SF, fantasy, children's, comics, essay, classic and novel — “manga” and “comics” come in with the comics family, “thriller” and “policier” with crime. The five formats and the three editions then cross freely, and that is where the trade's difficulty lies: the same title exists in pocket, in hardcover, as a collector and as audio — four products, four prices, four stock levels, and nothing in the title to separate them.

Three books, as cataloged

Indexed referenceWhat the engine extracts
978-2-07-041311-9 · The Little Prince, paperbackISBN_9782070413119 · FORMAT_POCHE · GENRE_CLASSIQUEISBN recognized, paperback, classic
Scandinavian noir, hardcover collector's editionGENRE_POLAR · FORMAT_GF · ED_COLLECTOR · COLLECTOR_GRAND_FORMATcrime novel, hardcover, collector's edition
Bilingual essay FR/ENGENRE_ESSAI · ED_BILINGUE · LANG_FR · LANG_ENessay, bilingual French-English edition

Three forms of one identifier

One customer types an ISBN with hyphens, another without, a third pastes an ISBN-10 while you index in ISBN-13. Three forms of the same identifier, and any one of them should be enough to find the book.

The same title, the right edition

The books pack recognizes the ISBN regardless of punctuation. It also cross-references genre, format, and edition, letting you offer “the same title in paperback” instead of an empty result on an out-of-print edition.

A term specific to your catalog that the pack still misses (a publisher-specific collection mention, for example)? Add your own Custom Rule from the console, simply describing what it should recognize — no regex required.

Index your bookstore catalog

The getting started guide covers the full setup, from sign-up to your first indexed catalog. The documentation details every endpoint.

Watch the breakdown happen. The table above is the engine's output, not hand-written. The same mechanism runs on the home page, with no signup — on a hardware or fashion catalog, not books. What you see there is the annotation mechanism itself, the one the livres pack applies to your ISBNs and formats.

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