How the American Dental Association Moved Beyond DRM

The American Dental Association has been publishing books, brochures and other materials to help members stay current and manage their practices for more than a century, and now generates about $10 million in sales and licensing revenue from these products.

The ADA migrated to Tizra this year after a rigorous RFP process, driven primarily by frustration with their previous digital publication solution, which relied on proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology. Under the previous digital publication solution, users were required to download special software to view the publications, which caused user complaints, and the DRM solution was unable to handle video and other supplements that went along with the publications, meaning ADA had to rely on cumbersome delivery mechanisms like CD-ROMs and flash drives.

Working with Tizra, ADA has not only eliminated these issues, they have gained the flexibility to pursue complex business models like group sales to large practices and institutions. ADA and Tizra are now actively exploring follow-on projects to add more kinds of content, and further develop publications as a key source of non-dues revenue to support ADA’s mission.

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Using XML to Create a Better Online Reading Experience for the American Payroll Association

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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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