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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.

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