Slater Reinvests in Tizra

In business there's only one thing more meaningful than having someone trust you to make good use of their money, and that's having them do it again! That's exactly what Rhode Island's Slater Technology Fund has done by announcing they'll increase their investment in Tizra.

Slater's been involved in Tizra from the days when we were just a few guys with an idea--initially with advice, and then with investment. They've been a great partner, always pushing us to dig deeper, think harder, do better and ultimately to believe in the potential of what we're doing. Now that that potential is bearing fruit, we're thrilled to see them increasing their involvement.

An AAUP Ebook Partnership, AND, Free, at last!

On October 1^st, Tizra will hold the first of a series of joint Tizra/Association of American University Presses (AAUP) webinars, webinars whose purpose is to put our platform directly in the hands of the AAUP membership as quickly as possible.

We’re honored to be the first e-publishing service the AAUP has chosen to sponsor (press release).

We are, after all, a software as a service platform, so we’re also really excited to be previewing our new self-service offerings and plans (yes, including FREE), and giving  hands-on access to a group known for innovation in electronic publishing. You’ll be hearing more as we begin to open up access group by group, or let us know if you want to try out the service for yourself. So,thank you AAUP, and we can’t wait to get started.

MIT Press CISnet Officially Launched

After a period of quiet testing, MIT Press is now rolling out CISnet, a library of more than 160 books (and growing) running on the Tizra Publisher platform.

More details in the press release.

It's been a busy summer...so busy we haven't been able to keep the blog up-to-date. More on that soon.

It's so cool!

I'm a real fan of MIT Press books, and have been for years. Lots of interesting stuff for me in Computer Science, New Media, Electronic Music, and all are well designed, beautiful books, which also matters to me. I have a bunch on my shelves, and more on my "buy someday" list. And this week, we have the public announcement of the Tizra-hosted MIT Press CISnet site.

This makes me feel really good because it's very much something that came from a daydream I had last year. I was up at MIT to talk with the (excellent) Venture Mentoring Service, and stopped in at the MIT Press bookstore after the meeting. As I was looking around, but not quite able to find one volume to buy, I thought that I'd pay right then to have access online, like the ACM digital library. I'd happily pay to browse around, search and use books for reference, and then later I might buy volumes that I really wanted to dive into.

So we approached MIT Press with the idea, and now there's a great electronic library subscription -- less than a buck per book/year of access. Even the pricing is on the order of magnitude of my daydream.

Thank you MIT Press, for doing such a great job!

Time for me to buy my subscription!

MIT Press Teams with Tizra to Build an Online Computer Science Library

The headline says it all. Details in the press release.

TidBITS Signs with Tizra

We honestly didn't intend for this blog to degenerate into a rah-rah series of signing announcements, but gosh, there's been an awful lot of that lately! The latest is TidBITS, a truly pioneering publisher of books for Mac users (and, yes, we described them that way before they became a customer).

Even if you're not a Mac user, you have to appreciate a company that's been publishing online continuously since 1990. For TidBITS, online distribution is the core of their business, not some new add-on. The Take Control ebooks, which they'll be publishing via Agile PDF, were written, edited and designed from the outset as digital products. They're a great example of information packaged and priced based purely on what readers want and will buy, regardless of traditional print constraints like what size clump of physical pages it's economical to manufacture and distribute.

We think this approach makes TidBITS a great partner for us…they're already thinking along just the lines that Agile PDF was designed to support! It's also interesting that they've chosen to distribute their ebooks in PDF—the first format we decided on as well. Unlike many publishers, their reasoning has nothing to do with the fact PDF is an easy byproduct of print production. They like PDF on its own merits—it gives them design control that lets them optimize pages for on-screen reading, yet supports features like linking and searching. We're really excited about what will happen when these features are combined with the those added by Agile PDF.

The Satisfactions of Matchmaking

As a company with a newly launched service we're naturally looking for partners whose services complement ours, and who can recommend us to their customers. At least that's how we assumed it would work. But recently we were in the fortunate position of being able to turn the tables by playing the matchmaker between Bibliovault, a leading provider of highly complementary digital conversion and archiving services, and one of our newest customers, New York Botanical Garden Press.

Founded in 1896, The New York Botanical Garden Press has one of the largest publishing programs of any botanical garden in the world, and, as you can imagine, unique print titles waiting for online exposure. Tizra had already been accepting bulk transfers of book content from Bibliovault on behalf of Duke University Press, making the uploading and data management process seamless.

So when The NYBG Press talked to us about their need for a reliable partner to facilitate print and digital distribution, we immediately thought of Bibliovault. Not only do they have the technical expertise to convert print to digital files optimized for online distribution, but they have an outstanding reputation for preserving valuable print content. It’s a win all the way around, and we’re looking forward to helping The NYBG Press make the most of Bibliovault’s services.