Tizra Blog

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 ...

The first wave is a wave of posts. I've arrived at the TOC conference , and gave my tutorial yesterday. I expect that the conference will give me ideas for several blog posts over the course of the conference. I've also got some stored up ideas that came from preparing the tutorial that should come out in a while... I have hope that the second wave will be a wave of action. I was gratified to hear that Digitizing Your Backfile was the tutorial with the highest registration. I'm sure there's selection bias at a conference like this, but it said to me that perhaps people are getting ready to act on projects. I hope that the good tutorial attendance means people are ready to act, not just test the waters. The water is great, and it's time to swim! I do have the sense that after a pause for a deep preparatory breath, online publishing is now heating up rapidly, and this time it's heading for action, not just interest. As people act, I'd like to be sure that th...

This is a big one for us. Rhode Island's Slater Technology Fund is betting $500,000 that Tizra will "really open the floodgates for book-based content from thousands of publishers." Their investment caps a year in which we've gone from four people , two dogs and an idea to a company that someone besides us and our friends and families believe will set online publishing on its ear. We even have our very own Forbes article . Thanks to the folks at Slater for being great advisors as well as investors, and to the many friends and family members who preceded them!

I have been working on my tutorial for the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference. I'm presenting PDF as a cost-effective option to create revenue from the the backlist as an alternative to XML. As a dedicated markup advocate from the days of SGML, and someone who helped simplify SGML down to XML, I still find it odd to be talking about other kinds of solutions, but I think I learned something from my custom web site customers... The XML Paradox is that XML is a high-quality archival medium, and obviously then, books and scholarly content would make the jump first. It just makes sense that everyone would use the high-value format for the longest-lived, highest value content. Wrong! The economics of publishing have played out the opposite way. The more ephemeral the content, the faster production methods can change. So newspapers were doing full-text databases from very early on. In the scholarly markets, journals are now almost all electronic. Books, however, are only start...

We spend a lot of time explaining ourselves to funders and prospects. In one of our first "real" presentations we were describing why readers will get better value from the improved reading experience of Tizra sites, and publishers will be attracted by that superior usability combined with really flexible and sophisticated selling and management tools. Someone jumped right in at that point and asked "whose side are you on, publishers or readers?" I tried to "unask the question" and say that we were on both sides, but was greeted by a flat contradiction -- "You can't be on both sides you have to pick who's more important." This dichotomy of sides seems to contaminate a lot of thinking in the "content industries", and it's fundamentally flawed. Simple economics gives the answer: Publishers and customers are fundamentally on the same side. The publishing industry generates value for readers, who pay for that value via the ma...