Tizra Blog

Thanks to all who participated in last week's webinar , and to MIT Press for a presentation that drew fantastic attendance and uniformly favorable comments. Video of the full presentation is below. Slides are available for download in PPT and PDF formats.

Exploiting Tizra's iPhone compatibility is one topic on the webinar agenda. When MIT Press launched CISnet just over a year ago, they were trying something radical: Creating a custom ebook site without investing in custom software and without expensive content conversion. The result was in the words of revered computer science professor Hal Abelson, "a treasure." Now MIT Press has very kindly agreed to share some of what they've learned from their experience developing CISnet on the Tizra platform, and some of their ideas for future expansion. Join MIT Press Editorial Director Gita Manaktala, and Digital Publishing Manager Jake Furbush for a free webinar… Tuesday, October 27 at 3pm EDT Space is limited. Reserve your seat now! We look forward to a fascinating discussion.

After extensive internal testing, the Association of Research Libraries has begun offering recent issues of its flagship publication on a public test site hosted by Tizra. The organization announced recently that Research Library Issues is now available in full-text searchable form at… http://publications.arl.org We're thrilled about this, not only because because it's a vote of confidence from a high profile organization, but also because ARL's membership includes some of the most prestigious research institutions in the world (including the libraries of MIT and Indiana University, whose presses are already using Tizra). In addition to greater production efficiency and flexibility, ARL's use of Tizra stems from a desire to provide members with capabilities including… Better full-text search. More targeted references via social software and other links. Better compatibility with web enabled mobile devices like the iPhone. We are proud to count ARL—and RLI reade...

Don't get us wrong. We love Google, as anyone who remembers what web search used to be like in the days of AltaVista , Excite and even the World Wide Web Worm has to do. But there are certain things even Google doesn't do particularly well, particularly taking users to the relevant part of a long document...without long downloads and repeat searches. Here's a quick video showing how Tizra solves this problem (among many others), based on actual experience we had looking up our trademark on the official US Patent and Trademark Office site. Note: Click the little TV icon above to see it big!

Non-technical summary: things are lots faster at Tizra sites and admin tools. There's certainly more to do, but we've got more tricks up our sleeves! Because the big current speed boost is related to one cause, and it took me a while to track down, the geek appendage to this post describes what we found and how we fixed it. Geekly details I spent a bunch of time last week looking at system performance. As we've been adding customers and usage, we were beginning to feel the pinch. Performance always varies, but the range of response times was getting wider as things slowed, leading me to think that there might be some systemic issues that would give us a quick improvement (and indeed there was some Linux tuning that helped a bit). But data access seemed to be the real issue, so I spent a bunch of time looking into hibernate, and our caching and querying, and then wound up spending a day or so basically watching all the queries go through Postgres. And you know what? most o...

Right now, our favorite thing about being a Software as a Service company is we can upgrade Tizra Publisher whenever we think it's right, without regard to ship dates or marketing rollouts. Or as the old Beetle ad said: "When we find a way to improve the Volkswagen, we do it. Then and there." It's been less than a month since we announced instant web signups for Tizra Publisher, but we've already found several ways to improve. So we upgraded our software. Then and there. A few hightlights... Downloadable Chapters & Subsections Tizra Publisher has always let you break documents up into smaller chunks, such as chapters, which can be sold or distributed independently, or remixed into new online products or collections. Now this capability is even more useful because you can let your users download the chunks for offline reading or printing. Each download is watermarked with your site's address, so there's no forgetting where they got it! Here...

"I didn't invent the rainy day, man. I just own the best umbrella" Almost Famous In an economic climate that led Publishers Weekly to predict 2009 would be "the worst year for publishing in decades," eBook sales are growing at more than 100% a year, according to the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). We think it's time more content owners—both inside and outside the traditional publishing industry—had access to serious online publishing tools that will open up this kind of opportunity. That's why we're rolling out free, self-service signups to Tizra Publisher. This is the same software that MIT Press is using to sell a collection of more than 170 computer science books on its CISnet site , and you can get your hands on it right now… FREE 60 SECOND SIGNUP If you'd like to learn a bit more, here's quick overview of what Tizra Publisher can do ( click the little TV icon at the bottom to see it big! ).