Use supported and valid HTML markup to structure and optimize your book description and make sure it looks great for consumers across all channels, browsers, and devices.
Marketing Insights assesses the code and HTML markup behind your product description. Though your content may appear correctly on the Amazon product page, you will still receive a red flag in Marketing Insights if your content does not meet established best practices outlined here.
Best Practices & Guidelines
We recommend using a limited set of HTML tags and special characters in book descriptions to ensure the broadest compatibility across retailers, web browsers, and devices and to help future-proof your content against changes in standards. Other HTML tags can have unintended effects on the consumer-facing description.
Basic text formatting
- Bold: <b> or <strong>
- Italic: <em> or <i>
- Underline: <u>
- Subscript1: <sub>
- Superscript2: <sup>
Paragraphs and line breaks
- Paragraph element: <p> (preferred for paragraph breaks)
- Line break: <br /> (preferred for single line breaks)
- Alternate line break: <br> or <br/>
Read more about using paragraph breaks to format and structure your book description.
Lists
- Bulleted (unordered) lists: <ul>
- Numbered (ordered) lists: <ol>
- Individual list items: <li>
Less common tags
- Citations / book titles: <cite>
- Definition lists: <dl>, <dt>, and <dd>
Special characters
Amazon, most online retailers, and other metadata recipients support UTF-8 character encoding and extended character sets for product information like titles and descriptions. This includes most commonly used characters, including Latin and foreign alphabets, diacritical marks, and other characters and symbols.
For most special characters, you can simply copy-paste the native characters themselves directly into your book description. (See table below.)
Named character entities are typically not recommended as they are not supported in XHTML. However, there are two notable exceptions: < (less than) and & (ampersand). These characters are reserved as they have other meanings and uses in HTML and XML applications and the named entities are predefined. For these cases, you must always use either the numerical character reference or named entity reference to ensure the character correctly displays in your copy. (You may use the > greater than symbol normally.)
If you have any doubts, numerical character references are safe to use in all cases.
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Common special characters In most cases, use native characters or the numerical character reference. To include < (less than) and & (ampersand) characters in your copy, you may instead use named entity references. (Greyed-out options here are not recommended.) |
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Character name |
Native character |
Numerical reference |
Named entity |
|
less than |
< |
< |
< |
|
ampersand |
& |
& |
& |
|
em dash |
— |
— |
— |
|
en dash |
– |
– |
– |
|
ellipsis |
… |
… |
… |
|
degree |
° |
° |
° |
|
cent |
¢ |
¢ |
¢ |
|
pound |
£ |
£ |
£ |
|
euro |
€ |
€ |
€ |
|
yen |
¥ |
¥ |
¥ |
|
copyright |
© |
© |
© |
|
(r) trademark |
® |
® |
® |
|
trademark |
™ |
™ |
™ |
|
left double quote |
“ |
“ |
“ |
|
right double quote |
” |
” |
” |
|
left single quote |
‘ |
‘ |
‘ |
|
right single quote |
’ |
’ |
’ |
|
Diacritical marks These may be used in conjunction with standard letters to create accented characters by including the letter followed immediately by the numerical character reference (for example, à results in à). |
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|
Mark |
Numerical reference |
Example |
|
̀ |
̀ |
à |
|
́ |
́ |
á |
|
̂ |
̂ |
â |
|
̃ |
̃ |
ã |
Notes & Tips
- Avoid the use of <div> tags, <span> tags, or inline style or class attributes.
- Make sure to include both beginning and ending tags. (e.g. <b>Bold text!</b>)
- Do not use header tags like <h1>, <h2>, etc.
- The use of non-breaking spaces ( ) is not recommended.
- Links and multimedia elements are not supported in book descriptions.
- We recommend keeping all tags in lowercase.
- Remember that HTML markup counts toward your character count max for the book description (up to 4,000 characters).
- Text may appear garbled or erroneously include odd, random characters if copied and pasted from Word or other WYSIWYG word processing programs directly. Consider using a free HTML editor to make sure your text and associated markup is cleanly copied and transmitted.
Guidelines for ONIX
- ONIX includes robust support for markup, special characters, and character encoding, but not all data recipients will handle product data in the same way. Keep things as simple as possible to ensure the broadest compatibility.
- XHTML is strongly recommended over HTML for both ONIX 2.1 and 3.0 (textformat="05") to ensure validation, improve display across data recipients, and remove the complexities of escaping characters and CDATA tags. Note: if using XHTML, all tags must be properly closed and in lower case.
- It is recommended that you explicitly declare UTF-8 encoding to avoid any errors with extended characters.
- Typically, native characters (like — or … ) or numerical character references (— or …) are preferred. Named entities (— or …) are note supported in XHTML.
References & Resources
- Supported HTML for Book Description [Amazon]
- HTML Entities and Symbols [W3Schools]
- UTF-8 [Wikipedia]
- Embedding HTML markup in ONIX data elements [Editeur - PDF]
- Best Practices for Product Metadata [Book Industry Study Group - PDF]
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