Skip to main content

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.

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...

Free Webinar: How to get off the mult-format content treadmill

Free Webinar: Friday, September 21 12-12:30 pm (ET) How to wrangle ALL your content types into one beautiful online hub… and get off the treadmill for good! It never lets up. First it was publications and conference materials. Then blogs and social media. Then webinars, infographics, podcasts and online courses. You keep cranking them out, but where do they all go? How can you keep your communications investment from evaporating at the speed of Twitter? Tizra lets you bring it all together into a great-looking, searchable, mobile-friendly website that delivers long-lasting value to your audience. In 30 minutes you will learn... How to broadcast and curate mixed media types for maximum impact. How to categorize content for ease of use and maintenance. How a well-tuned search can reveal hidden gems. REGISTER NOW!

Why Books in Browsers? A Closer Look at e-book Publishing Software Choices

What’s an ebook?   For many, the first thought is of a Kindle, Nook or similar device, designed for a single purpose and packed with texts downloaded from a single retailer.  However, it’s easy to forget just how new that notion of ebook publishing software is...or how quickly it’s changing. Vintage Rocket eBook (left) and SoftBook devices show how quickly the basic definition of an ebook can change.  (From the collection of Tizra founder David Durand.) As broadband connections and computing power become more pervasive, the idea of “books in browsers” or “books in the cloud” is gaining traction.  As has already happened in other media with services like Hulu, Netflix and Spotify, book publishers are starting to see the value in streaming content direct to users as they need it, rather than requiring them to download it to their own device before use. The Case for Books in Browsers: Delivering books or content in browsers is ideal for publishers that wan...