Our Superficial Review of Surface: It Works with Tizra!

The new Microsoft Surface tablet was on the doorstep at Tizra HQ this morning, and we took a little time to run it through some basic tests. Overall, our feeling was in line with the reviews: Nice hardware, and potentially attractive for those looking for a more mobile way to use MS Office. Still a ways to go on software, though.

We tried the Windows RT version of Internet Explorer 10 on a few Tizra sites, and overall they worked as expected, though interactions with the new reading interface we've just developed (more on this soon) were sluggish. Part of it may be incompatibility with some underlying scripts, which will be tuned as IE 10 becomes more of a factor. Part of it was probably just our unfamiliarity with new Metro interface.

So for now, our minds are open on Surface as a device, but more importantly, we're thrilled to see another major player striving mightily to develop better ways for users to interact with the great content our customers deliver through Tizra.

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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.

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