http://www.rpgnews.com/article.php?sid=3291
http://www.rpgnews.com/article.php?sid=3294
http://www.adventuretrade.org/

So, does anyone know anything about this? In particular, the man behind it, and how useful it's likely to be in actuality? I'm thinking if any of the industry people here want to weigh in, that would be good.

Also, would membership help an indie publisher at all? My knee-jerk tendency would be to say "no", as there isn't anything being provided that you can't find information about elsewhere (in many cases, on threads here), not to mention that I'm not sure what the advantage of the ATO is over, day, GAMA. But I could be wrong... What do people think?

I started the ATO and in the process of doing so, found out about indie-rpgs.com. I had no idea this resource was out here and to be candid, in the short run there's a lot more here than you'll ever find on the ATO website. Very nice community that I had no idea existed!

Cheers,

If you publish products and you find that you need barcodes for your products, the obvious choice is going to be obtaining a UPC Code. This is the universal code that manufacturers use to make their products compatible with cash registers in the mass market chain stores.

Website domain names used to be free for anyone that asked, so a company got the brilliant idea that they should charge for them and get a monopoly on their use. Then they started charging annually for them. It soon got out of hand and you have the mess you see today.

UPC codes used to be free. Then someone got the brilliant idea they should charge for them and get a monopoly on their use. UPCs now have an annual fee of over $600 (but goes higher depending on how rich your company is). It will soon get out of hand.

As other industries get richer, this tiny fee isn't a big deal at all. However, as our industry broadens its scope with hundreds of more publishers, these annual fees are becoming a barrier to entry for small, independent publishers.

Let's face it, assigning barcodes isn't rocket science. It's a number people. You take a number (with a particular algorithm to be sure it's unique) and you use a barcode truetype or opentype font to render it in a series of bars that can be picked up by a scanner. Anyone with this font and a number can make a barcode. The trick is that the number must be unique from all of the rest. The ATO has the database of over 50,000 products that have been published in our industry and it keeps getting larger. We are assigning a unique number to every product and we'll do the work necessary to keep them unique.

Some companies in our industry do use UPC codes, and as long as they want to sell in mass market stores, they should continue to do so. Other companies have a small block of UPC codes but they reuse the codes or extend their existing codes by using additional digits that may not work with some scanner configurations. These are technically violations of the UPC rules, but these circumstances happen because of the large expenses related to buying additional UPC Codes. IBC bar codes are free, so there's no penalty for using as many as you want.

IBC codes are unique from UPC codes, so whether you use an IBC or a UPC, they will scan as distinct products. Other companies only sell to the hobby shop market and don't require the use of a UPC. About 20% of hobby shops have computer point of sale systems, but that percentage is increasing. Hobby shops can utilize any barcode they want, so the IBC provides a nice alternative. Small publishers also have no reason not to barcode their products either.

You can get your free IBC bar codes at www.AdventureTrade.org/25.asp?ID=1434. No membership required, no setup fee, no annual fee, no per-code fee.