The bibliographic data services marketplace is set for upheaval next month, when US giant RR Bowker cuts its ties with Nielsen BookData and launches against it in the UK market.

Bowker will stop taking data from Nielsen BookData on 30 March and create its own UK database to feed into Global Books In Print. Nielsen BookData has been the only serious contender in the market here for almost two years, since it was created from the merger of Book Data and Whitaker in 2002 - a move that was investigated by, and approved by, the Competition Commission.

The blow will be the second of a double whammy for Nielsen BookData, which had major data quality issues last year when it merged the companies' two databases. The company has adopted an upfront approach over the quality issues, apologising to customers and claiming that service levels are back to normal.

Nielsen BookData executive director Richard Knight said: "98% of the 4.1 million book sale transactions covered by Nielsen BookScan retail panel during the week ending 13 November 2004 were successfully matched on all key data fields against [our] data."

The company's sales and marketing director, Brigid Macleod, told IWR: "We've said that the service we gave is not what we expect of ourselves, and one of the good things that has come out of this is that our quality is now better. Both publishers and users have recognised that what we do is important to them - a top quality service is an essential."

Bowker's UK MD Doug McMillan said the company had not chosen to launch at this time to take advantage of customer pain over its rival's problems. "We simply want to offer an alternative," he told IWR. "Bowker has never charged publishers an admin fee for inclusion, and we don't want to put up barriers to publishers getting their information to users."

McMillan said subscribers are unlikely to benefit from a price war: "We see little benefit in slashing the price of the data. Subscribers will benefit from greater quality," he said.