CBA's Christian Retail Solutions Committee (CRSC) has adopted new Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) subject codes that include the former Christian Product Category codes for books. BISAC, the main standards forum of the Book Industry Study Group, approved the codes Thursday.

The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) and CBA both have endorsed the codes, which will be affected with the new BISAC subject headings in January. Publishers should begin assigning the new codes in January, ECPA said in a statement.

The widely accepted subject codes for categorizing, organizing and merchandising books were launched by the former Christian Product Standards Group in 1999.

“Using uniform subject codes to merchandise a Christian bookstore is one of the most effective means of serving customers, managing inventory and growing the Christian publishing channel,” said Michael Covington, ECPA's director of information and education. “We will be able to track the movement of Christian books as compared with all other types of books, thus giving us a greater grasp of how effective we have been in our mission and helping us to plan for the future.”

CBA Manager of Retail Technology & Strategy and CRSC Chairman Eric Grimm said the simplified code structure creates reporting and application efficiencies that will benefit retailers and publishers.

ECPA said the new codes will be available on the CRSC Web site this month. A sub list of the entire BISAC list will be available for application to Christian publisher products, helping to maintain current data analysis abilities available with the Christian Product Category (CPC) codes. ECPA also will provide a map from the old CPC codes to the new BISAC codes sub list for retailers and publishers wanting to help automate the transition.