Tizra Blog

"The Tizra architecture gives us confidence in our digital products, even with tens of thousands of students logging in." —Lawrence Frank, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, LAB-AIDS LAB-AIDS is in the business of delivering mission-critical education content, reliably and on a large scale.  For over 50 years, the company has developed, manufactured, and published science education materials for middle- and high-school students, and for teachers across the United States.  In that time, the company has built a reputation for delivering activity-based materials that go beyond the textbook. These materials need to be available to students and teachers at all times — especially during the after-school crunch time when students are doing homework. "Reliability and scalability are crucial to our business," says LAB-AIDS Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Lawrence Frank. "The Tizra architecture gives us confidence in our digital products, e...

This is the first in a series of blog posts based on our recent webcast, "10 Factors to Consider when Developing your Digital Publishing Strategy." If you weren't able to attend, you can still watch it in its entirety, including the interactive question and answer session here. We start with the very core of your publishing business —  audience. Audience drives both sides of your publishing business.  On the product side, it should be the touchstone that guides your editorial and content development efforts.  Book publishers need to make sure their organizations are structured so that the voice of the audience is heard clearly and with authority.  Traditionally in magazine publishing, this role has been served by the editor-in-chief.  Most book publishers don't have comparable structures, and creating them is one of the great challenges of successful online brand building. Your audience impacts where you promote and sell your content — big box reta...

For years Tizra has focused on giving publishers the power of custom software, without the expense of building it themselves. We're tremendously proud of how this approach has empowered many small- to medium-sized publishers to take control of their futures and build digital publishing programs in ways that would otherwise have been beyond their reach.   But what about larger organizations who may already have strong development teams in-house, or who have already built or bought their own software? We hear you, too, and have now rolled out a series of APIs that will enable you to take advantage of the power of Tizra in ways that extend, and integrate with, what you already have. HighWire Press is taking advantage of Tizra's new APIs to generate complex pages for Duke University Press, combining data from multiple sources and platforms. Choosing Open Web Standards Obviously, we're software developers ourselves, so it was important to us to take with an app...

Everyone is thinking about digital publishing, but are you ready to make it a strategic part of your publishing business? According to the Pew Research Center , 23 percent of Americans 16 and older read ebooks within the last year. With more and more content being consumed online, publishers are going beyond tactical one-offs, and taking a serious strategic look at the transition to digital publishing as a core part of their business. In this free webinar hosted by Digital Book World , we will review the 10 most important factors publishers need to consider. The webcast will feature a presentation by Stanford University’s HighWire Press , the technology partner and platform to 150 scholarly publishers, on the decision process they went through when selecting a strategic partner to enhance their ebooks product offering. Join Digital Book World, Tizra, and HighWire on Tuesday, November 12, 2013 at 12pm ET to get the inside scoop on what to consider in building your digital b...

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...

Guten Tag! If you are attending the Frankfurt Book Fair and thinking about your digital publishing strategy, we’d like to meet with you to tell you about all the great things happening at Tizra including: Our recent partnership with HighWire to power their Folio ebook platform (see below) How Goodheart-Willcox uses Tizra to create digital first content Exciting new features such as an improved e-reading experience , new mobile responsive design templates , and new APIs for faster uploading and better design integration Plus, some big news we can't tell you about until the show! Find Tizra at: The American Collective Stand Hall 8.0 S31 or email us at carlos.martinez@tizra.com to arrange a meeting. Please join us in congratulating HighWire on the launch of Folio! Built on the HighWire Open Platform and leveraging Tizra for ebook integration, Folio is a flexible, scalable, ebook solution, providing a user-friendly, intuitive reading experience t...

Drag-and-drop activity from one of G-W's Tizra-hosted digital textbooks shows how digital-first puts readers first. For most publishers moving to digital, the best strategy is usually to start with their existing print catalog.  Consultants may deride this as a “shovelware” approach (meaning you’re just shoveling print content online), but the truth is it’s the shortest path to getting live with a good quality product, and beginning the process of learning what works and doesn’t work for your readers. Once this is underway, however, it makes sense to start thinking more strategically about  digital first  content.  What do we mean by digital first? We think of digital first content as material that was born digital, i.e, developed from the outset to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by digital delivery, rather than tacking digital features on as an afterthought. Digital-first content enables publishers to do more for the customer.  For ex...

CCFCS curriculum materials hosted by Tizra are winning raves from teachers. After 44 years of empowering teachers with print materials that were aligned with key instructional goals, Texas Tech Curriculum Center for Family and Consumer Sciences (CCFCS) made the bold decision to go 100 percent digital using the Tizra digital publishing platform. At first, the task seemed daunting.  “We printed out a copy of each of the curricula and some of them were four inches thick,” says center director Patti Rambo.  In addition to a massive quantity of materials for its 33 courses with 300-350 teaching strategies per course, the school also needed to meet aggressive revenue goals and appeal to a diverse customer base. The Center’s search for solutions was exhaustive until they were directed to Tizra. “Tizra is flexible enough for us to make up the rules as we go along,” said Rambo. “We were able to design our pages so there’s less scrolling, and we were able to color code th...

In the print world, when you think about a reader’s user experience, you consider factors like the size and weight of a book, paper quality, typeface, layout and design.  Moving to digital, some of these factors still hold true, but others are replaced with concerns such as speed, intuitive controls, cross-platform compatibility, plus as with any human interface, a host of intangibles.  We’re always working to make the Tizra reading experience crisper, easier, and less distracting, because happier readers mean happier publishers. Tizra reader upgrade makes it easy to enhance content with interactive lightbox effects. The update builds on Tizra’s ability to provide usability and compatibility across all the most popular web browsers and viewing devices, and is now available to all Tizra customers. Enhancements include:   Speed -- e-reading should be as crisp, fast and simple as turning a page. Your readers are not going to tolerate delays waiting for cont...

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...

Gibbs Smith Education a publisher specializing secondary school social studies textbooks, needed to find a way to move to digital publishing quickly to meet the requirements of school districts, while ensuring they met the curriculum standards set by each state.   “We needed to meet the needs of schools who want the option of print or digital,” said education sales and marketing director Corine Sayler. “We knew schools were not buying as many printed texts as they used to.” As a company that prides itself on Pulitzer nominated authors and meticulous attention to grade level-appropriate content, Gibbs Smith wanted to move to digital publishing in a way that preserved the levels of quality editorial and graphic design that had been so successful in print. Gibbs Smith also recognized that selling material in a digital format would open up new sales opportunities and revenue models, and was determined that any digital effort should be carried out on their own terms and ...