Tizra Blog

David Durand and Anne Orens will be at the Online Information 2007 conference in London next week, giving demos and answering questions about Agile PDF, which is on track for its first public release in a matter of weeks. Drop a note to info@tizra.com to schedule an appointment.

If anyone can obsolete the printed book, Amazon can, and they're clearly taking a formidable whack at it with their handheld Kindle reader. We can't help wondering, though, how many consumers will really pay $400 for a single-purpose reading device, when alternatives from a riotously competitive hardware market combine reading with phone, messaging, music and other capabilities. For example, the iPhone pictured here, with a tasty looking page delivered via Tizra's Agile PDF . We wish we could say it's the result of some special technology we came up with for delivering books to mobile devices, but really it's just a byproduct of the fact that Agile PDF makes books work like the web. So as the web finds its way into more mobile devices, so will books published with Agile PDF. Meanwhile, of course, there are already a billion or so eager readers accessing the web through more traditional means. By the way, the sesame crusted tuna's from Montreal's Aix Cui...

Rhode Island's small, but it's got talent. I'd put the community of designers and software engineers surrounding Brown and RISD up against any I've worked with in New York or Boston. Yet technology startups haven't flourished here as you might expect, and much of Rhode Island's talent gets lured to the brighter lights of bigger cities. Yesterday, we got more evidence that the state is working to correct that when the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation approved our application for a $100,000 Innovation Tax Credit .  The credit will provide one more reason for investors to bet their capital on Tizra, and will mean Tizra can put more of those great engineers and designers to work close to home.

There's a new business development and networking site starting up for Rhode Island, the RI Nexus . I think they are still in soft launch mode to get the last bugs out, but if you follow the link you can get a peek now! It's a project of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, who are working with Jack Templin of Providence Geeks fame to make it all happen. Of course we're happy that our recent news is timed with their preparations for launch, as they've written some nice things about Tizra. Rhode Island's size is often perceived as something that gets in the way of new businesses, but it is also be a real advantage in keeping companies and people well connected. The RI Nexus is a new, more formalized way to facilitate and capitalize on this, which is a good thing. Right now it might help us a little, but I'm sure it will help the state as it continues to develop. Way to go EDC!

John Blossom's post on traditional portal strategies resonated with my recent thinking about aggregation sites ( Shorelines: portals Passe ). I made his post into a silly slogan for my subject line, but he is making a good case that even in the "piling things up" business, there are potential problems with actually piling them up. Reading it, for a minute, I had a pang about Tizra. You might be able to read it as saying that it's not worth building your own content collection at all, but I don't think that is the practical point for publishers. I think that the notion of stressing context and tuning product offerings to user groups is exactly what we enable with our product and content management tools. You need to have a branded presentation of your content to all your different audiences, and make every audience an offer that they want to buy. That takes a lot of flexibility, which is what we've concentrated on. That flexibility should be on tap, not the en...

A brief moment for a minor bit of boosterism. Duke University Press has come on board with Tizra as a charter customer, something we’re excited about for a couple of reasons. We're seeing how the emergence of long tail sales strategies is beginning to transform book publishers’ business models. The Duke books program, with its combination of long-lived scholarly and trade content, is particularly well-suited to a long tail sales strategy. We are also really delighted at the prospect of working with such a smart and forward-looking publisher.

This is a bit of a hormone-supplemented blog post, but I hope the length is worth it. We spend a lot of time pitching to potential investors. You need faith in your idea, and an ego of steel, because they're usually critical. I find it helps to think about all the great companies that barely got funded, were rejected by everyone, etc. That's nice for confidence, but you also need to think hard about every objection; they've dealt with a lot more business plans (certainly than I have, probably than you have, too). So once I've cheered myself up, I try to follow up on my "they just don't get it" boosterism and look to see if it's me that just doesn't get it. This note is inspired by some criticism that I don't believe, even after thinking about it. One prospect didn't like Tizra's business model of helping publishers sell their own stuff; he prefers to create or license large aggregations of data. "Aggregations mean real value and...

The Adobe announcements last week were very interesting, but not for the reasons most people seem to think. Here's the real story: The most important producer of print publishing tools is backing an XML-based format for electronic delivery, by making it a (relatively) painless option after preparing something for print. This means the new electronic format can come out the kind of editorial process publishers are already using. With all the limitations that this XML format has, it's much more in reach of publishers who can't afford to change all their editorial processes in a single go. There's been a lot of concentration on the idea that a standard format will speed ebook reader adoption. This is something that vendors like Sony are realizing is important. Is this their first open format use in electronic media?. And indeed for the long-term future, I think that this is an important issue for vendors. For publishers and businesses right now, though, the focus on new ...

Publisher's weekly seems to have missed a key part of my message during Rebecca's and my backlist tutorial, which is that the long-term term payoff of XML is sufficiently expensive and disruptive that it can't happen quickly for publishers with significantly smaller resources than Thomson's, and that image based solutions like PDF can meet a lot of needs very quickly, for publishers that don't want to postpone full entry into online markets another 2-5 years. The Adobe announcements (especially integration of new e-book formats into print-oriented production tools) seems to present a more practical way for smaller publishers to change their workflows than the "big-bang" conversion project. But that kind of incremental strategy leaves existing PDF and image backlists just the way they are, and means that PDF will be a key part of all solutions for online marketing and product definition for the foreseeable future. Sometimes the future's so bright tha...

I have seen far from all the talks here, but from what I've seen and the buzz that I've heard the winner of the "coolest presentation award" was Manolis Kelaidis. He showed a paper e-book device that he's been prototyping. By means of conductive ink traces, a person touching a button on the page can trigger an action by an embedded processor.  He had a book where pads on the page triggered actions on his laptop: going to web pages, playing songs on iTunes, and so forth.  It  was a hand-bound Bluetooth book! There's clearly a huge expense still involved in platform building and so on, but everything he did is compatible with contemporary printing technology, using inks that are commercially available (not experimental). Other developments in printable circuitry play into this as well: printable batteries, printable electronic components,  printable speakers. Of course this is a technology, not a solution, and there's a huge chain of associated requirements ...

The first wave is a wave of posts. I've arrived at the TOC conference , and gave my tutorial yesterday. I expect that the conference will give me ideas for several blog posts over the course of the conference. I've also got some stored up ideas that came from preparing the tutorial that should come out in a while... I have hope that the second wave will be a wave of action. I was gratified to hear that Digitizing Your Backfile was the tutorial with the highest registration. I'm sure there's selection bias at a conference like this, but it said to me that perhaps people are getting ready to act on projects. I hope that the good tutorial attendance means people are ready to act, not just test the waters. The water is great, and it's time to swim! I do have the sense that after a pause for a deep preparatory breath, online publishing is now heating up rapidly, and this time it's heading for action, not just interest. As people act, I'd like to be sure that th...

This is a big one for us. Rhode Island's Slater Technology Fund is betting $500,000 that Tizra will "really open the floodgates for book-based content from thousands of publishers." Their investment caps a year in which we've gone from four people , two dogs and an idea to a company that someone besides us and our friends and families believe will set online publishing on its ear. We even have our very own Forbes article . Thanks to the folks at Slater for being great advisors as well as investors, and to the many friends and family members who preceded them!

I have been working on my tutorial for the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference. I'm presenting PDF as a cost-effective option to create revenue from the the backlist as an alternative to XML. As a dedicated markup advocate from the days of SGML, and someone who helped simplify SGML down to XML, I still find it odd to be talking about other kinds of solutions, but I think I learned something from my custom web site customers... The XML Paradox is that XML is a high-quality archival medium, and obviously then, books and scholarly content would make the jump first. It just makes sense that everyone would use the high-value format for the longest-lived, highest value content. Wrong! The economics of publishing have played out the opposite way. The more ephemeral the content, the faster production methods can change. So newspapers were doing full-text databases from very early on. In the scholarly markets, journals are now almost all electronic. Books, however, are only start...

We spend a lot of time explaining ourselves to funders and prospects. In one of our first "real" presentations we were describing why readers will get better value from the improved reading experience of Tizra sites, and publishers will be attracted by that superior usability combined with really flexible and sophisticated selling and management tools. Someone jumped right in at that point and asked "whose side are you on, publishers or readers?" I tried to "unask the question" and say that we were on both sides, but was greeted by a flat contradiction -- "You can't be on both sides you have to pick who's more important." This dichotomy of sides seems to contaminate a lot of thinking in the "content industries", and it's fundamentally flawed. Simple economics gives the answer: Publishers and customers are fundamentally on the same side. The publishing industry generates value for readers, who pay for that value via the ma...