Tizra Blog

America’s fourth oldest university press today became the latest in a string of prestigious organizations that have chosen to manage, distribute and sell electronic versions of their books and other content using Tizra's highly flexible web publishing platform . Great validation for the idea that, in an era of commodity content, some publishers really understand value of their brands , and are taking steps to extend and build on them. Read the full release .

Update: New Session Added. Join us for a live webinar , Friday, May 21 at 1pm EDT If you own valuable content, there's a dizzying proliferation of new ways to sell and otherwise distribute it electronically...from downloadable Apps, to embeddable widgets to expensive custom XML-based websites. All have their tradeoffs, but at Tizra, we think there's one factor that, more than any other, should guide your long-term strategy: Does it build your brand? Brands aren't just colors and logos. Brands are what happens when publishers deliver content that readers believe in visit after visit, and build audiences that authors want to reach. Like Joe Esposito, we believe in the power of publisher brands . And we agree with Mike Shatzkin that the publishing brands of the future are being built right now on the web . Our software sits quietly in the background, helping some of the most respected organizations in the world promote, sell and deliver their own electronic ...

Contrary to our recent post, we do not actually believe Apple intended the iPad as a Tizra viewer . For all the talk of Apps and iBooks, the iPad's real significance is that it does a better job than anything we've yet seen of lowering barriers to using the web. You don't have to wait for it to boot up, it doesn't need to be recharged all the time, is small enough to keep on you most of the time, but is big enough that you don't have to squint or scroll too much when reading and can fit enough of your fingers on it to type reasonably well. Plus its touchscreen is intuitive enough and response is fast enough that you don't lose your train of thought while getting from one place to another. As Tim Bray says, " speed is a feature ." All these things come together to create something that enables us to work the web—with all its incredible power to inform and facilitate interaction—into more and more of the corners of our lives where it didn't ...

We were in line with everyone else at the Apple Store this morning, eager to see how the sites our customers have built on Tizra would look on the iPad's web browser. The verdict? Fast, easy and beautiful. A great new way to search and access content on Tizra-powered sites (and anywhere else on the web). Thanks, Apple! Browser thumbnails present a smörgåsbord of Tizra-powered sites. A page from Document Engineering on the the MIT Press CISnet site. An appetizing page from eat.shop sf bay area . Search results on the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation's Tizra site. As always, Tizra's search takes you direct to the exact page of the document you're looking for.

Think back to the summer of 2007. The first iPhones are just hitting the stores. Kindle is still a gleam in Jeff Bezos' eye. And in the words of Publishers Weekly, "a festival of practical geekery" is taking place in San Jose, CA. That festival was the first Tools of Change for Publishing conference. We were there , of course. And while comparatively small, it was the largest gathering we'd found of people who cared as much as we did about the transition from print to digital books. That's still true today, which is why I'm excited to be on the floor of ToC 2010 as I write this. The show's a lot bigger now, and has spread beyond its geeky roots to focus on seismic shifts we're all aware of…the explosion of handheld devices , social software and changes in the ways all of us find and use information. If you're here, come see us. We'll be in booth 114 with our partners Digital Divide Data , and you can ...

You may have read that Rhode Island's making a serious push to establish itself as a hub of innovation and economic growth in the green energy sector. At the core of this effort is a document called "A Roadmap for Advancing the Green Economy in Rhode Island," which was unveiled today by Governor Carcieri, Senate President Paiva Weed and RIEDC Executive Director Stokes at an invitation-only event keynoted by retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark. Perhaps less well known is the fact that the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation tapped Tizra to deliver the document, which can be found on their website at… http://publications.riedc.com/view/qe2ne/default It's a great example of how an organization can simultaneously provide faster and easier access to information, while simultaneously fostering local economic development, and preserving natural resources that might otherwise go into printing hundreds of copies of the document. Or for all you P-Bruins fans, you...

The web. Duh. But with Apple's anticipated Tablet [Update: iPad!], Google's Nexus One phone and any number of other shiny objects to distract us, it's easy to forget that even the most massively successful of these platforms—the iPhone—has maybe 60 million users , whereas the web has about 1 billion. Maybe this is why the Nexus One's tagline is "web meets phone," and why even though few really know what capabilities Apple's long-rumored tablet will have, it's a safe bet it will feature a great web browser just like the iPhone does. The simple reason is that the web is simply too big for even the biggest device makers to ignore . Which is very good news for those of us looking for the best ways to reach large audiences with digital content. The fact that all these great companies are coming out with more great devices just means more ways for users to access the content we serve . As long as open web standards prevail, those of us who stic...