Case Study: 49th Shelf achieves scalable management of 70,000+ Canadian titles with Ibexa

49th Shelf - Customer Case Study

49th Shelf is Canada’s leading online resource for Canadian-authored books, launched to raise the profile of domestic titles in a market dominated by imports and large retailers. The Association of Canadian Publishers tasked Turner‑Riggs Workspace to build a single searchable database under a tight deadline that could ingest and manage an uncertain — ultimately massive — number of titles and millions of associated content objects (covers, reviews, metadata).

Turner‑Riggs partnered with Mugo Web and used eZ Publish (eZ Platform) with Apache Solr and ONIX/BiblioShare integration to automate large-scale data imports, provide an intuitive admin API, and serve rich metadata at scale. Since launching in 2012 the site has grown to 70,000+ titles, attracted ~300,000 visitors and 800,000 pageviews in two years (about 15,000 uniques/month), 3,500+ registered users, and early revenue from advertising, an Amazon.ca sponsorship and licensing of its import technology — with further feature and content expansions underway.

49th Shelf

Craig Riggs

ACP Project Manager