Skip to main content

Start of two waves?

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 they act carefully, and think about all the options (including ours, of course).

I sometimes worry that our no-development self-managed model is confusingly different to people who have been conditioned by years in which expensive custom builds were the only way to get stuff online without being bundled into someone else's aggregated product.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Using XML to Create a Better Online Reading Experience for the American Payroll Association

Congrats to the American Payroll Association on their recent launch of XML-based publications on Tizra!  Thanks to this collaboration, APA's authoritative books for payroll professionals are now available in crisp, reflowable HTML, creating a user experience that feels like a truly digital native product, rather than a conversion from print. XML-based publishing also creates a better mobile reading experience, supports more precise search and navigation, and opens the door to better accessibility for users with low vision and other disabilities. Our partners at  Scribe  did a great job supporting APA through the process of producing the XML for loading into Tizra, and we’d definitely recommend them to anyone interested in such a transition. It’s hard to overstate what a big step forward this is for Tizra as a platform and a company. XML has long been planned for in the product's architecture, but now for the first time, we have a working example that demonstrates t...

Princeton University Press Partners with Tizra to Take Einstein Papers Online

Unprecedented project will make nearly 30 volumes of Albert Einstein's papers available throughout the world. October 9, 2013 (Providence, RI) -- Princeton University Press has selected Tizra as the digital publishing platform it will use to make The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein available online.  One of the most ambitious publishing ventures ever undertaken in the documentation of the history of science, The Collected Papers will ultimately comprise more than 14,000 papers selected from all phases of Einstein's career and fill nearly 30 volumes. The online version hosted by Tizra will provide easy, searchable access to the full archive, and will offer features including: Powerful, bilingual search, with page-specific search results. Links between German text and corresponding English translations. Persistent, page-specific URLs to facilitate citation, referencing and discussion. Easy online viewing in all common web browsers, including those on the most p...

Scarcity Amid Abundance

One ramification of Chris Anderson's economics of abundance argument was nicely summarized by David Hornik: don't do one thing, do it all; don't sell one piece of content, sell it all; don't store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn't work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all But for most publishers this has been easier said than done. They may have an abundance of content, but building, feeding and tuning current online distribution and marketing systems is enough of a resource hog to dampen the experimental spirit at all but the richest. This, as you may have guessed, is the problem we're working on at Tizra. We think we're pretty close to solving it.