I've been meaning for a while to register this mini-moan somewhere online. It is ultra dull, though, and relates to part of the ONIX message, so you'd best not click below. Move along, move along. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

I am astonished at the number of times you have to state availability in the ONIX standard. I'm someone who obsesses about the number of keystrokes I have to make to do a task - the fewer the better. At B&Q, for instance, I know that it took 138 keystrokes to register a new title on SAP (their badly-implemented although world-class ERP solution) (god, acronyms, ERP means Enterprise Resource Planning. Er, which means Big Database of Everything), because I counted them, and moaned, and moaned. So I have a history of wanting to do things in the quickest way possible - especially if they're very boring things like maintaining a product database.

To comply with the ONIX standard, these are the fields you have to complete just to describe product availability:

Availabillity Status Code: e.g. Not yet published
Product Availability: e.g. Not yet available
Publishing Status: e.g. Forthcoming

I mean, I know it's only three, but some publishers publish hundreds of titles a year and that's a lot of triplication. And anyway, it's the principle of the thing. Anyone care to enlighten me on the difference between them?