Export Validation
PExOD allows you to quickly locate and fix data that doesn't meet the required standards of each export.
Great Canadian Support
PExOD was initially developed especially for Canadian publishers, resulting in several unique features:
PExOD reports which titles are at the Booknet Canada Silver Certification level, and PExOD provides excellent support for getting your titles to the Silver level.
PExOD provides an export to CIP Books in Print, with the same support for making sure that your data meets the required standard. See for information regarding the relationship between PExOD/ONIX fields and CIP fields. PExOD-CIP mapping
PExOD supports setting specific discount information for specific agreggators, allowing Canadian publishers to export ONIX to Indigo, which has been reluctant to accept coded discounts, and ensures that this information is only exported to the intended recipient preventing issues of private data going to the wrong agreggator.
Imports
PExOD contains a powerful flat-file ( i.e. spreadsheet ) import tool. This is intended to allow you to move all your existing title data into PExOD efficiently. As well, it provides the simple way to maintain and update properties across all your titles - such as suppliers or prices. And flat-files are still the lingua franca of computer programs, so this provides options for workflow interoperability.
Drive Your Website
PExOD can be easily modified to fit in with any existing website, or can provide all the services to drive the the complete website. PExOD uses a simple templating system to allow HTML-capable people to take full control of the look and feel. And with some basic Javascript sophisticated interface features can be controlled on individual page. As well, PExOD provides a Content Management System ( usually refered to as CMS ) to allow non-HTML people to maintain the content of text-based pages. And of course, PExOD drives most of the bibliographic data that it maintains out to the website to improve the saleability of your titles.
Powerful Editor
PExOD provides a rich and detailed editor to manage all of your bibliographic data. The editor is intuitive and quickly becomes an efficient tool. The philosophy behind the editor is to avoid bad data while not frustrating the person doing the editing. As well, the editor should not limit the complexity of the data that can be generated: If it's permitted in ONIX, it should be doable from the editor.
Support
Email and phone support. Support for getting day-to-day tasks done and for integration into your working environment. New versions are often available to keep up to date with changes in requirements and providing additional functionality and providing modifications based on user requests.
ISBN-13
PExOD supports end-to-end use of ISBN-13, including automated addition of ISBN-13 and EAN-13 numbers to existing title data.
Direct Sales
Version 2.38.27 contains a fully integrated online sales solution built to operate with the Beanstream.com credit card transaction processor. This first version of the "PExOD Merchant" provides a secure sales solution that allows publishers to provide excellent security to their customers without having to manage secure HTTP services. As well, publishers can provide per-title discounts, and sell their titles in CAD and USD. Transactions are logged within PExOD allowing sales tracking and supporting fullfillment.
For those users with an external fulfillment agency, such as university presses who can rely on the university bookstore to sell their titles, PExOD provides a mechanism to link titles to the bookstore with an appropriate URL.
Rich Promotional Support
PExOD supports, on the public web site, several components to aid publishers in promoting their books and publicity efforts. Publishers can present a Best-Seller list, Featured Titles, and a list of New Releases. As well, PExOD provides the ability to present a rich collection of information to advertise Events and News Releases. These can be associated with individual titles and or contributors. Everything is controlled from within the administrative side of PExOD.
Track Changes
Whenever you change a piece of data PExOD notes the date, so that you need only export modified records as time goes on.
Centralized
PExOD provides a single location to save, manage and review your bibliographic data. This means that you can reduce wasted effort managing the same data in multiple locations, or not managing the data at all. You can use PExOD to answer the daily stream of inquiries about your title list, again saving effort. And you can leverage the data to support other tasks. This is enabled by the highly accessible nature of PHP and MySQL - which are simply not available to other technologies.
Extensibility
PExOD is built on PHP and MySQL, which are, aside from being operating-system independent, ubiqutous and free, they are also robust, secure and well understood by many developers. Furthermore, PExOD is written in a very simple-to-understand style, with a plain and intuitve architecture. In fact, the database schema, on it's own, provides a very clear understanding of how PExOD internally manages the relationships between different data.
Flexibility
If your data is either hosted on someone else's server and you can only get at it through their tools or your data is housed within a propriety database the effect is the same - you are distinctly limited in how you can get at your data. Since PExOD is built on MySQL the data is directly accessible by several good open-source tools ( For example, see http://www.phpmyadmin.net/ ) or by dumping the MySQL database directly. You're never frozen out of your data.