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.

Comments

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...

Yum! Tizra Eats Its Dogfood

We keep talking about how Agile PDF makes it easy for nontechnical users to do sophisticated online publishing. Well, tell a story like that long enough and people start to wonder why you're not doing it yourself. Besides, any product benefits when its designers and builders are also users. Software developers call it eating your own dogfood . So a few nontechnical members of the Tizra team dug in (with Joya, pictured above, as menu advisor). We did it just they way any publisher would, applying our company branding with the Agile PDF control panel and basic CSS skills, then uploading PDFs . The only difference is we're not actually publishers, so we used files freely available on the web, and of course, we're giving them away rather than selling them. Voila! The New Agile PDF Demo Site Take a look . Then drop us a note , and we'll show how you can do the same—and a lot more—with your content. All of us, except maybe Joya, found it quite the best dogfood we...

Duke University Press signs an agreement with Tizra

A brief moment for a minor bit of boosterism. Duke University Press has come on board with Tizra as a charter customer, something we’re excited about for a couple of reasons. We're seeing how the emergence of long tail sales strategies is beginning to transform book publishers’ business models. The Duke books program, with its combination of long-lived scholarly and trade content, is particularly well-suited to a long tail sales strategy. We are also really delighted at the prospect of working with such a smart and forward-looking publisher.

Tizra Blog

Search This Blog