Tizra Blog

Launching today, THE DIGITAL EINSTEIN PAPERS is a publicly available website of the collected and translated papers of Albert Einstein that allows readers to explore the writings of the world’s most famous scientist as never before. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE [ PDF Version ] Princeton, NJ – December 5, 2014 – Princeton University Press, in partnership with Tizra, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and California Institute of Technology, announces the launch of THE DIGITAL EINSTEIN PAPERS ( http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu ). This unique, authoritative resource provides full public access to the translated and annotated writings of the most influential scientist of the twentieth century: Albert Einstein. “Princeton University Press has a long history of publishing books by and about Albert Einstein, including the incredible work found in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein,” said Peter Dougherty, director of Princeton University Press. “We are delighted to make these t...

A while back, we announced a partnership with ReadSpeaker, a leading provider of text-to-speech software. We're really excited to see how our customers have been using the capability to make their ebooks and other content more accessible to users with vision impairments and other handicaps… as well as more engaging for all kinds of users. Check out what Gibbs Smith is doing with their history textbooks in the video below, and request a demo if you'd like to learn more about how they did it.

Tizra makes books—and book fairs—easier to navigate. Along with much of the publishing world, we are excitedly preparing for the annual Frankfurt Book Fair next week.  275,000 participants are expected, more than the population of Tizra's home city of Providence. If you're like us, you'll want all the help you can get navigating the maze of pavilions and events, so we've posted web versions of the show's handy A-to-Z quick reference guide on the Tizra demo site, in English and Deutsch .  Hope you find it useful...and that we see you among the 275,000!

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 .

We recently took a closer look at the analytics for publications delivered through Tizra , and were not surprised to see that mobile usage continues to rise sharply. But what did surprise us was just how quickly one particular mobile device—the iPad—is driving a fundamental change in the way people consume content. Apple's iOS mobile operating system is now second only to Windows in popularity , mostly because of the rapid rise in iPad use. Compared to a year ago, iPad traffic is up 277 percent , and now represents 21 percent of total user sessions on Tizra-powered sites. It's hard to think of a better opportunity for publishers of eBooks and other long-form content.  If you'd like to know more about how publishers like the  International Association for the Study of Pain , LAB-AIDS and others are working with Tizra, please drop us a line .

We have talked about three of the 10 Factors to Consider when Developing your Digital Publishing Strategy , including audience , selling direct , and monetization . Today, we tackle discovery. The way readers discover new books and content is changing and this is happening not just in the consumer trade publishing business. Discovery is moving from bookstores and face-to-face conversations to online discovery and referrals through social networks, and, as a recent study from Bowker Market Research shows, this is true even of ebooks.  In fact, O'Reilly Tools of Change published findings in 2013 to show that 39 percent of their sample discovered books online, 27 percent through an online publication, and 14 percent through social media.  So what does this mean for publishers? It means rethinking your marketing strategy to focus more on online discovery. Here are 5 Strategies for Improving your Online Ebook Discovery: 1. Search Engine Optimization - a tric...

An email from one of our customers this morning reminded me that sometimes it’s best to just get out of the way and let them do the talking.  Following is unedited text from John Weatherby, Director of Product Line Management, at LAB-AIDS  (and an umpire in his spare time), on why he recommends Tizra to his colleagues...                 Reliability of TIZRA – we have experienced very little downtime during the course of our relationship and that is critical, especially to teachers that rely on access during class time                 Cross platform Capabilities – This is key in my mind as the diversity of the products teachers and students are using to access TIZRA is an issue. To develop something in-house that would work across all platforms would be fairly complicated                 Technical Support – You guys have done a great job supporting us and tr...