Tizra Blog

At the  Bookseller's FutureBook blog , Molly Flatt does an excellent job of summing up the incredible advantages and opportunities that browser-based books offer over books as apps and ebooks. The post is definitely worth a read. In it, Flatt argues that books as apps lead to an unpleasant experience for readers, due to both the barrier of entry of downloading and the inconvenience and disruption of leaving the "walled garden" each time one clicks on a link. Tizra's publisher clients would most likely agree with Flatt that apps are equally if not more painful for publishers: "From a publisher’s point of view, producing and distributing content via an app is a total pain - from creating complex InDesign files to working with frustrating external shopfronts such as the Apple Store. And it’s useless for SEO."  Noting the advances by leaps and bounds that web design has made in recent years, Flatt states plainly that the web now "better cater...

Helping readers maintain the kind of contextual awareness and quick navigation that print books naturally afford has been a perennial challenge in designing digital reading interfaces. Our new thumbnail browsing option helps by displaying a row of small page images below the main reading area. Readers can quickly skim back and forth to spot the page layouts and illustrations they're looking for. It's especially helpful with educational, reference and illustrated texts, where ability to home in fast on the right page is key. [ TRY IT NOW ] If you're a Tizra customer and you'd like the feature activated, just drop us a line .

Targeted promotions and content bundle upsells are two ideas to test in optimizing sales. This is the third in a series of blog posts based on our webcast,  "10 Factors to Consider when Developing your Digital Publishing Strategy."  You can still watch it in its entirety here: So far we have talked about the importance of understanding your   audience  and whether or not to sell direct . Today, we investigate the various monetization strategies publishers utilize.  The entire publishing industry has been experimenting with pricing and delivery models, from the Netflix-like subscription services offered by Oyster and Scribd, to bundling of ebooks with print editions, to chapter-at-a-time sales and more. Yet no single pricing model has emerged.  What does that tell publishers? It means that you need the flexibility to experiment with your pricing strategy and adapt quickly to market fluctuations and demands. You will need a commerce and delivery...

As those who regularly commute between the worlds of print and digital are painfully aware, important things are often lost in translation.  For example, digital people tend to think in terms of "physical" page numbers (the ones you see in your text editor as a document scrolls by on screen), whereas print people tend to think in terms of "logical" page numbers (Roman numerals for introduction and other front matter, Arabic for the rest, like you see in books). For many of our customers, this hasn't been a problem, in part because we make it so easy for users to deep link directly to specific pages using standard URLs. But for others, it can cause real confusion. Think of teachers assigning reading to their classes using multiple pagination schemes. Now Tizra's added the ability for publishers to have it both ways: every page is linkable as always, but logical page numbering is also supported. That means when the teacher says "go to page viii i...

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 ...

Exploiting Tizra's iPhone compatibility is one topic on the webinar agenda. When MIT Press launched CISnet just over a year ago, they were trying something radical: Creating a custom ebook site without investing in custom software and without expensive content conversion. The result was in the words of revered computer science professor Hal Abelson, "a treasure." Now MIT Press has very kindly agreed to share some of what they've learned from their experience developing CISnet on the Tizra platform, and some of their ideas for future expansion. Join MIT Press Editorial Director Gita Manaktala, and Digital Publishing Manager Jake Furbush for a free webinar… Tuesday, October 27 at 3pm EDT Space is limited. Reserve your seat now! We look forward to a fascinating discussion.

I'm a real fan of MIT Press books, and have been for years. Lots of interesting stuff for me in Computer Science, New Media, Electronic Music, and all are well designed, beautiful books, which also matters to me. I have a bunch on my shelves, and more on my "buy someday" list. And this week, we have the public announcement of the Tizra-hosted MIT Press CISnet site . This makes me feel really good because it's very much something that came from a daydream I had last year. I was up at MIT to talk with the (excellent) Venture Mentoring Service, and stopped in at the MIT Press bookstore after the meeting. As I was looking around, but not quite able to find one volume to buy, I thought that I'd pay right then to have access online, like the ACM digital library. I'd happily pay to browse around, search and use books for reference, and then later I might buy volumes that I really wanted to dive into. So we approached MIT Press with the idea, and now there's a gr...

We honestly didn't intend for this blog to degenerate into a rah-rah series of signing announcements, but gosh, there's been an awful lot of that lately! The latest is TidBITS , a truly pioneering publisher of books for Mac users (and, yes, we described them that way before they became a customer). Even if you're not a Mac user, you have to appreciate a company that's been publishing online continuously since 1990. For TidBITS, online distribution is the core of their business, not some new add-on. The Take Control ebooks , which they'll be publishing via Agile PDF , were written, edited and designed from the outset as digital products. They're a great example of information packaged and priced based purely on what readers want and will buy, regardless of traditional print constraints like what size clump of physical pages it's economical to manufacture and distribute. We think this approach makes TidBITS a great partner for us…they're already t...

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...

You may have noticed we were pretty excited about O'Reilly's Tools of Change conference, which is still going on through the end of today in New York. This is really the place for people who love books, digital technology and the things they can do for each other. Apparently the ranks of people like this are growing. Eight hundred attended this year's conference, compared with 200 last year, when our CEO David Durand gave his Tutorial on Digitizing your Backlist. Overall, the show was all we could have hoped for. Underlying the rapid attendance growth is a general feeling that 2008 is the breakout year…the year books start to move online in the way other media have over the past dozen years. David Rothman, an influential blogger at Publishers Weekly had just written us up , and interest in our proposition was high. We were especially excited because this year we were on the program to give a Lightning Demo of Agile PDF, including the first showing of a new control p...

The Adobe announcements last week were very interesting, but not for the reasons most people seem to think. Here's the real story: The most important producer of print publishing tools is backing an XML-based format for electronic delivery, by making it a (relatively) painless option after preparing something for print. This means the new electronic format can come out the kind of editorial process publishers are already using. With all the limitations that this XML format has, it's much more in reach of publishers who can't afford to change all their editorial processes in a single go. There's been a lot of concentration on the idea that a standard format will speed ebook reader adoption. This is something that vendors like Sony are realizing is important. Is this their first open format use in electronic media?. And indeed for the long-term future, I think that this is an important issue for vendors. For publishers and businesses right now, though, the focus on new ...

Publisher's weekly seems to have missed a key part of my message during Rebecca's and my backlist tutorial, which is that the long-term term payoff of XML is sufficiently expensive and disruptive that it can't happen quickly for publishers with significantly smaller resources than Thomson's, and that image based solutions like PDF can meet a lot of needs very quickly, for publishers that don't want to postpone full entry into online markets another 2-5 years. The Adobe announcements (especially integration of new e-book formats into print-oriented production tools) seems to present a more practical way for smaller publishers to change their workflows than the "big-bang" conversion project. But that kind of incremental strategy leaves existing PDF and image backlists just the way they are, and means that PDF will be a key part of all solutions for online marketing and product definition for the foreseeable future. Sometimes the future's so bright tha...

I have seen far from all the talks here, but from what I've seen and the buzz that I've heard the winner of the "coolest presentation award" was Manolis Kelaidis. He showed a paper e-book device that he's been prototyping. By means of conductive ink traces, a person touching a button on the page can trigger an action by an embedded processor.  He had a book where pads on the page triggered actions on his laptop: going to web pages, playing songs on iTunes, and so forth.  It  was a hand-bound Bluetooth book! There's clearly a huge expense still involved in platform building and so on, but everything he did is compatible with contemporary printing technology, using inks that are commercially available (not experimental). Other developments in printable circuitry play into this as well: printable batteries, printable electronic components,  printable speakers. Of course this is a technology, not a solution, and there's a huge chain of associated requirements ...