: Microdata: should I use Book or Product type scheme? I'm developing a site for an antiques shop, specialized in rare and ancient books. Every page for each book will have a description sheet

@Connie744

If the books are given the schema schema.org/Book then they inherit all the properties from schema.org/CreativeWork and of course schema.org/Thing - because Book is a subtype of CreativeWork, and everything is a subtype of Thing. Using schema.org/Book gives you isbn, edition, etc from Book, plus award, genre, author, contributor etc from CreativeWork, plus you can use comment and keywords as you choose. Also available using Book is anything inherited for Thing, like description and sameAs.

You can mix in whichever non-schema fields (like book size) that you want without causing a problem with the structured data. It just means that book size (for instance) isn't as likely to be in the snippet and that searching by book size won't improve the page's hits. Blemishes and book size don't seem to be key terms a person is likely to use for searching (compared to say, book name or publication year).

By choosing Book you can fill in the author and then link to the schema.org/Person schema to give more information about the author, possibly using sameAs to link to the wikipedia page or another source to uniquely identity the author. Any links like this that you don't wish to display can be hidden with the tag or

For each individual copy of a book you can use offer - which is a property of CreativeWork (and inherited by Book). This allows you to have multiple offers by linking to schema.org/Offer - You can represent
the condition of the book and Price within Offer.

Examples adapted from schema.org/Offer
A single book which including book size without schema:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book">
<img itemprop="image" src="catcher-in-the-rye-book-cover.jpg"
alt="cover art: red horse, city in background"/>
<span itemprop="name">The Catcher in the Rye</span>
<link itemprop="sameAs" href="http://wikipedia.org/Catcher-in-the-Rye">
Author: <a itemprop="author" href="/author/jd_salinger.html">J.D. Salinger</a>
<span itemprop="numberOfPages">224</span> pages
Publisher: <span itemprop="publisher">Little, Brown, and Company</span>
<meta itemprop="datePublished" content="1991-05-01">May 1, 1991<br>
ISBN-10: <span itemprop="isbn">0316769487</span><br>
Book size: 6 x 8 inches<br>
</div>


A single book with schema.org/Offer linked in to give the book's condition and Price.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book">
<img itemprop="image" src="catcher-in-the-rye-book-cover.jpg"
alt="cover art: red horse, city in background"/>
<span itemprop="name">The Catcher in the Rye</span>
<link itemprop="sameAs" href="http://wikipedia.org/Catcher-in-the-Rye">
Author: <a itemprop="author" href="/author/jd_salinger.html">J.D. Salinger</a>
<span itemprop="numberOfPages">224</span> pages
Publisher: <span itemprop="publisher">Little, Brown, and Company</span>
<meta itemprop="datePublished" content="1991-05-01">May 1, 1991
ISBN-10: <span itemprop="isbn">0316769487</span>
<div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
Price: <span itemprop="price" content="6.99">.99</span>
<meta itemprop="priceCurrency" content="USD" />
Condition: <span itemprop="condition">Slightly creased spine</span>
</div> <!-- marks the end of the Offer schema -->
</div> <!-- marks the end of the Book schema -->


I've found it easier to get the webpage written and add in the schema one by one, eg just add Book, once it works correctly then add Offer, then Author, etc. It only takes a few days after getting google to re-fetch the page before it shows in search results.

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@Shanna517

An entity (like a book) can have multiple types. Stating that something is a Book and a Product (or in your case maybe IndividualProduct) is possible and can make sense.

However, Microdata has only limited support for multi-typed entities: the spec requires that


all types come from the same vocabulary, and that
each property is defined for all of the used types.


The first requirement is why Schema.org introduced the additionalType property (it’s only useful to Microdata): it allows to add additional types from other vocabularies; but this does not also allow to use properties from these other vocabularies.

The second requirement is unsolved (and maybe stays like that). Many people just ignore it and use all properties anyway.

Other syntaxes than Microdata (i.e., JSON-LD and RDFa) don’t have these limitations.

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