Tizra Blog

Tizra + iPad = Perfect

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Winchild) — Thu, 31 May 2012 13:06:00 +0000

Tizra's new iOS reading interface lets you reach the fast-growing iPad audience with all the power of Tizra, including its well-established ability to help you publish to iPads in just seconds. Our Why Tizra is the Ultimate iPad Publishing Platform Top Five List!

Great reading experience -- A newly enhanced mobile web interface that's optimized for iOS touchscreens, with quick page flips at the swipe of a finger, and specifically tuned search and navigation.
Amazing flexibility -- Unbundle & remix content to create new products. Sell chapters, articles & topical collections.
Always up-to-date -- New content is instantly available on users' devices. No waiting for apps to sync.
No App Store Middlemen -- Keep 100% of your revenue...and skip the slow approval process.
No Custom Software Costs -- Tizra's iOS reader is regularly upgraded by Tizra at no additional charge to our subscribers. No need for expensive, unreliable custom code!

The Numbers Tell It All
iPad use is growing at a staggering rate across the web, but on Tizra-hosted sites, it's growing even faster. Just two years after the tablet's debut, our analytics show it accounts for nearly 8% of all visits to sites our customers run on the Tizra platform. Compare this to less than 2.5% on typical sites, according to comScore.

Tizra iPad Visits -- Mar 2010 - Feb 2012

The Best Platform is Cross Platform

The best thing about Tizra's new iPad-optimized reading experience is that it's not just for the iPad. The same open standards based web technology we used to create it will soon be enhancing the way users interact with content on their PCs, Macs, Android tablets, Linux boxes, etc. It's part of our ongoing commitment to helping you create online reading experiences -- and great customer relationships that build your band and your business.

Use Case: Delivering Digital Teaching Materials Quickly and Securely

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Wed, 18 May 2011 12:47:00 +0000

We've been talking a lot about features lately. Now, how to use some of them in real life.

Say you're a publisher of textbooks or other teaching materials. You're good at selling to schools, but you need an efficient and secure way to get digital products into the hands of students after the sale. Tizra gives you a number of ways to get this done (in addition to built-in ecommerce for self-serve credit card sales), but today we'll focus on a new option built around the batch account loader, which makes it as simple as copy and paste. Note that second and third steps below only need to be done the first time you set up…

1. Add and Tag Users
Use the new batch account loader to load and tag email addresses for the students who should have access (if you don't have emails, there are other options we'll cover in future posts). Pick a tag that's short and easy to remember. For example, if you want to arrange access to a book called Knowledge 101 during the upcoming fall term, you could use a tag like "kno101-fa2011." (Once you create the tag, you'll be able to select it from a picker so it's easy to standardize.)

2. Create an Account Set
Account Sets let you create groups of users based on their tags. To create one for the users just tagged, go to USERS > Account Sets in the control panel, then click "Create New…" You'll get a screen like the one below, into which you can enter a name for the set, like "Knowledge 101, Fall 2011." Then you can define who should be included by using the tag picker to add the "kno101-fa2011" tag in the appropriate filtering field (presumably "Matching All" in this case). Click "Save" and you'll see the filtered list of users at the bottom of the screen.

Filtering users into an account set.

3. Add a License
By adding one of Tizra's highly flexible content Licenses to the Account Set, you can control what content its members will have access to, and for how long. Click "Create New…" under the Set Licenses heading, and you'll get a dialog that lets you select from any content Collection or Offer on the site. Once the License is created, you can just click on it to get the editing dialog shown below, which lets you adjust options including Duration of access (which will automatically begin counting down when the user first views the content), number of Concurrent Sessions (so you can sell group licenses and restrict unauthorized sharing of logins) and whether or not users have access to downloadable versions of the book or supplemental materials. Once the license is added, members of the set will automatically have appropriate access.

Setting license terms for members of the set.

4. Repeat…skipping steps 2 & 3
Once you've got things set up as above, all you need to do to authorize new users is load and tag them as in Step 1.

More Eggs in More Baskets: How the AWS Outage Made Us Stronger

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Mon, 16 May 2011 20:36:00 +0000

Like a lot of web companies, we learned some hard lessons from the Amazon Web Services outage of a few weeks ago. We didn't lose a single byte of data, but we resolved never again to put one service provider—no matter how large and diversified—in a position where its failure could cause a serious interruption in service for our customers.

As promised, we 've now finished setting up automated data backup and redundant server infrastructure in facilities maintained by a completely separate company: Softlayer Technologies. Like AWS, Softlayer maintains the high security and reliability standards we require, including SAS 70 Type II Certification and PCI DSS Compliance. And their Texas location adds geographic diversity to the Virginia and California regions Amazon gives us access to.

This is in no way the end of our efforts to improve reliability and security. We'll keep refining backup, failover and recovery processes to ensure not only that our customers' data is safe but that it remains available to a rapidly growing user base. Still, we wanted to mark this milestone as a way of making clear that the lesson was not only learned but acted on.

Time to Fire the Sysadmin? What We're Doing About the AWS Outage

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 19:04:00 +0000

The downtime brought about by the massive failure at Amazon Web Services has now agonizingly stretched well into a second day, causing us to question practically everything we thought we knew about hosting web applications.

Lurking behind it all is the nagging anxiety that maybe we should go back to a simpler time, when men were men, and ran their own machine rooms. Then come the flashbacks, and we remember what that was really like. All it took was a careless backhoe operator…

The truth is that for all the pain and, yes, embarrassment, the answer is not to turn back the clock. The answer is, as it almost always is in these situations, to use this experience to build something better. Something that leverages the best of the new tools, with a deeper understanding of their risks.

Another way to put it: Don't fire the sysadmin while he's trying to fix the servers. Keep cool and get the crisis resolved, then do a full post-mortem to squeeze every drop of learning you can from the experience.

In that spirit, we wanted to share our plans for preventing and recovering from future outages. The truth is these have been in progress for a while, but you can bet they'll now be exposed to a whole new level of scrutiny and outrank all other priorities until they're complete.

Bad Case Scenario

For starters, we will of course continue to follow the recommended Amazon Web Services practice by maintaining backups that replicate our data and software across multiple Availability Zones. Availability Zones are, according to AWS documentation, designed so they do not share common points of failure, such as generators and cooling equipment. In addition, they are physically separate, so "even extremely uncommon disasters such as fires, tornados or flooding would only affect a single Availability Zone."

Moving data across availability zones is fast, and is supported by powerful AWS snapshotting capabilities, so it's possible to make very frequent backups, and to recover quickly.

In the Bad Case Scenario where an Availability Zone fails, we'll be able to spool up new application and database servers in a separate Availability Zone, recover files from a recent backup snapshot stored in Amazon's highly stable S3 infrastructure, connect to an already-running live database backup, and be back online in less than a half an hour. We'll use the AWS Elastic IP feature to eliminate DNS propagation issues which can sometimes delay restoration of access for some users.

But as we've seen, redundancy across Zones is not always enough. While AWS maintains this is extraordinarily unlikely, the recent outage took out multiple Zones, which brings us to the next scenario.

Worse Case Scenario (like the current one)

In addition to maintaining redundancy across Availability Zones, we will also do so across Regions. AWS maintains five Regions (each containing multiple Availability Zones) around the world. There's one on the East Coast and another on the West Coast of the US. To protect against the failure of an entire Region, we will maintain a live database backup on the opposite coast, and a complete file backup updated at least nightly (unfortunately, AWS snapshots cannot currently be made across Regions).

If all the Availability Zones on one coast go down, we'll start up pre-configured application and database servers on the other one, connect up to the live database backup, and restore from the nightly file backup. It will take somewhat longer, since snapshots and the Elastic IP feature will not be available. Also, content added since the last backup will not be available until the other Region is restored. (Even in the current case, it does not appear data has been permanently lost).

Even so, we should be able to get back online within an hour.

Worst Case Scenario

So what if something happens to AWS as a whole, or at least they somehow lose both coasts? For that case, we'll maintain what's called a company-diverse backup plan. That is, we'll maintain server infrastructure with another provider completely separate from Amazon. We'll keep nightly database dumps and file backups on servers there. If the AWS data is truly gone from both coasts with no warning, there's the potential that up to a day's data could be lost, and there would be some delays in restoring service, since we're dealing with real, rather than virtual hardware, and real IP address changes, but it should still be possible to be online within a day.

Then we just have to worry about the guy with the backhoe.

Feature Frenzy #3: Quickly Loading & Tagging User Accounts with the Batch Loader

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Continuing the Feature Frenzy series, today we'll introduce the new account batch loader, which provides a simple way to create and tag user accounts on Tizra hosted sites. Who cares? Anyone who wants to do things like...

Sell content via email promotions — The loader lets you quickly add members of your mailing list, and give them access to special deals, free samples, etc.
Deliver content in bulk to schools, companies, etc. — Use the loader to fulfill large numbers of orders quickly when selling through an existing sales team or other offline method.
Manage "members only" access — The loader provides a quick, simple alternative to single sign-on integration, helping associations and other groups keep member lists up-to-date.

We'll detail some sample applications in upcoming posts, but first, the basics: To use the batch loader, just go to the "USERS" area in the Tizra Control Panel, then click the "Upload" button down at the bottom of the page. A dialog like the one at left pops up. Paste in a list of usernames, enter any tags you want applied to them, and submit. Your users are created and tagged.

You can then use the tags to create groupings called Account Sets, and provide appropriate access to all members of each set using Licenses. The Licenses are extremely flexible, enabling you to provide access for a certain amount of time from first access, between fixed dates (such as a semester), up to a certain number of simultaneous sessions (or seats), and letting you control whether supplemental downloads like spreadsheets, slides or video are included.

To ease management and improve security, users created via the loader are flagged with the special status "Email Verification Required." This means that the first time the user tries to log in, they'll be prompted for a password, and will receive an account activation link via email. This process verifies that they are who they say they are, and from then on, the users can update their own username, password and other information, without contacting support.

A simple feature, but one that opens up all kinds of possibilities. More on those soon!

Feature Frenzy #2: Giving It Away (Strategically) with Sampling Licenses

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:47:00 +0000

Continuing the Sisyphean task of trying to blog as fast as Tizra is upgraded, today's Feature Frenzy covers the new Sampling License, which as the name suggests, makes it much easier to give away precisely those chunks of content that advance your marketing mission...while keeping the rest behind the paywall or otherwise off limits.

The sampling license is ideal for promotional strategies like...

Using one content format to promote another — Say you want users to have free access to a web-only version of your content, but to charge them for the convenience of a version they can download, print, or load into their iPad or other ereader. Or maybe you want to charge for video, or other multimedia extras.

Metered paywall — Gives users free rein to sample whatever parts of your content interest them, but limits the total number of pages they can view. With the Sampling License, you can achieve an effect similar to what publications like the The New York Times are planning (presumably on much more expensive software than Tizra!).

Pages 1-X free — Similar to the way the Transportation Research Board is giving away the first two pages of each of the thousands of technical papers they're distributing on Tizra, since those just contain summary information that helps promote the content.

Sampling License controls let users specify page ranges, date ranges, content formats and number or page views to be included in the sample.

To set up a sampling license, just go to the collection you want to manage in the Tizra control panel. Click "Create Sampling License" and the dialog above pops up. You can then specify a date range and content formats you want it to apply to. If you want to restrict to a certain page range, or number of page views, check the "Page Sampling" box and follow the directions.

Then click "create" and you're done. The terms are immediately applied to all the content within the collection. Much faster than managing your samples one document or document excerpt at a time!

Other Sampling Strategies: Lead Generation

Generating leads with free content downloads.

Of course there are other reasons to give content away, some of which are best supported by pre-existing Tizra features. A common one is using content giveaways such as white papers, analyst reports, etc., as an incentive for users who may be interested in your products to submit contact information.

Setting an Offer to Free.

You can support this by creating an Offer as you normally would when selling content, but instead of entering a price, selecting the "Free" option. Users will automatically be presented with appropriate registration screens and claim buttons like the one above. You can add whatever fields you want to the registration form by going to USERS > Individual Accounts, then picking an account and clicking "New Property."

Free Excerpts
In many cases, letting prospective buyers leaf through selected parts of a document, like the introduction or foreword, is the best way to help them decide if they want to buy. That's why MIT Press gives away the front matter of books like Bandwagon Effects in High Technology Industries on their Tizra-hosted CISnet site.

Excerpt controls let Tizra customers like MIT Press give away specific sections of books (or sell them).

With our standard Excerpt features, you can specify exactly which pages should be in the samples, and they'll automatically be labeled "FREE" on the table of contents without your having to muck around with web design.

Creating an Excerpt from a ToC entry.

To configure free Excerpts, just go to the Properties page for the Document you want to offer samples on, then click the Table of Contents tab. Click "Create Excerpt" on the ToC items as shown above. When you've got all the Excerpts you want, click each and select "yes" next to "Make this Excerpt Free?" Then publish the Excerpt and it'll be open to the world!

Sites that Speak Volumes: Recent Launches by Consumer Reports, TRB, Davis & Columbia

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:26:00 +0000

Already, it's clear 2011 is going to be different. Holiday shoppers gorged on ereaders, iPads and smart phones. And after years of talk, digital content sales are actually skyrocketing the way the pundits said they would.

We're seeing the results in a whole new level of action and ambition from our customers. They're pushing beyond ebooks to create digital destinations that combine anything from conference video to consumer editorial to classroom PowerPoint slides.

As you'll see below, the sites speak for themselves. Our customers are building their brands and achieving their goals, while teaching us new things every day!

Consumer Reports

http://www.healthspecialreports.org

Consumer Reports Health was looking for a way to market a series of downloadable reports providing in-depth, unbiased information. Working with Tizra, they succeeded in launching a custom-tailored e-commerce portal within weeks. Tizra provided design and production services, so Consumer Reports could meet tight deadlines without distracting internal resources, then provided training so they could take site management in house.

Transportation Research Board

http://amonline.trb.org

Our friends at Omnipress are among the best when it comes to configuring Tizra to the needs of large professional gatherings. Nonetheless, the TRB Annual Meeting Online site was a tall order, with more than 5,700 session videos, technical papers and presentations to be shared among more than 10,000 participants. Omnipress rose to the challenge, delivering a site that showed off their web design capabilities, and leveraged Tizra's search, access control and ecommerce to the hilt.

Davis Publications

http://digitaleditions.davisart.com

As the only educational publisher in the world solely dedicated to visual art, you can bet Davis Publications didn't want to compromise on the look of its new ebook site. They didn't want to compromise on schedule either. Tizra's crack design and production squad delivered the site exactly on time, just three weeks after kickoff. And that includes time for two rounds of very discerning design review!

Columbia University Press

http://cupola.columbia.edu
Columbia University Press was looking to establish a new digital brand, selling direct to readers. And they wanted to test chapter-at-a-time sales, along with ereader-ready downloads and a variety of subscription terms. And they wanted to take advantage of their own in-house design resources. The Tizra platform let them have it all. Their staff created a beautiful look using our powerful tools, and now they have CUPOLA (Columbia University Press Online Access). All the flexibility and power of custom software, without the giant development costs!

Customer Coolness: Selling Ebooks by the Chapter, Download & Web Subscription All at Once

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 15:04:00 +0000

Sometimes a customer uses our software so well all we can do is gape and point. (Actually, it's been happening quite a lot lately.) Example: The way Columbia University Press has neatly exploited Tizra features to turn simple PDF files into a whole range of ebook products, including...

Web-only subscriptions of various durations.
Full book download/web combos.
Single chapter download/web combos.

A reader who just wants to answer quick questions about, say, how the concept of Strategic Innovation applies to Bill Gates, could just buy a chapter and browse it immediately online. Someone with a deep interest in the topic could buy the right to download the whole book, load it into their ereader and take it with them on the road.

Tizra's supported these kinds of options—and a lot of others—for some time, but it takes design and copywriting flare to present them in ways users can quickly make sense of. We think the paywall page below does it really nicely.

Typical CUPOLA paywall page automatically displays all relevant purchase options.

Tizra's dynamic offer management enables CUP to automatically put just the right promotions in the right places. For example, if you want to read Flash Versus Blink: An Introduction to Strategic Intuition, which they offer as a free sample, you'll go straight through to the the content, and can either view it online or download the whole chapter. But if you want read "Warrior Buddha: The Path to Beginner’s Mind," you'll hit a paywall page like the above.

Even better, CUP can now quickly test variations on pricing, terms, copy and design to optimize results.

It's still early in the project, but it looks to me like CUP's been reading some of their own books!

Feature Frenzy #1: The Cure for Post-Publication Panic

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Tizra isn't the same software it was a year ago. Or even a month ago. In this series, we'll outline a few recent upgrades that are making our software more useful and valuable all the time. Upcoming posts:

Promoting your content with flexible sampling licenses.
Quickly creating and tagging user accounts with the new batch loader.
Tailoring advanced search with custom fields.
Applying and updating access and sales terms across large numbers of documents, or document subsections, with the new content lists.
Single Sign On integration with popular association management software.
Customizing user profiles to gather key demographic details.

Today: Quick fixes and updates with new publishing options.
Ever have post-publication panic…that sudden chill when you catch an error right after clicking "Publish to Live"? Fixing these slips has always been pretty easy with Tizra, but now it's quicker and your users need never know it happened…even if you goofed on a LARGE scale.

Say, for example, you misspelled the name of your Very Important Author on her latest, thought-leading report. As always, you can just type in your changes and click "Publish," but maybe you don't want to wait the extra seconds it'll take to reprocess the whole PDF file. Just click the "Publish metadata only" checkbox and your update will be live in a second or two.

As long as you don't need to update the underlying PDF, the feature works for changes to any metadata field…tags, keywords, abstracts or any custom field you've added. And if you want to apply it to many documents at once, you can use it in batch operations from the main documents list…in which case those seconds can really add up!

Now, what if your homepage features a listing of latest updates? Normally, it's handy that Tizra automatically adds new reports whenever you publish them, with the newest at the top. But if all that's new about what you're publishing is that the name isn't misspelled anymore, maybe you don't want it bumped back up the list. Just click the "Don't update publication date" box before you click "Publish" and the fix goes in quietly.

Especially nice for RSS subscribers, who won't be bothered with alerts for a "new" publication that's really just a minor tweak!

Columbia University Press Signs with Tizra

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:04:00 +0000

America’s fourth oldest university press today became the latest in a string of prestigious organizations that have chosen to manage, distribute and sell electronic versions of their books and other content using Tizra's highly flexible web publishing platform. Great validation for the idea that, in an era of commodity content, some publishers really understand value of their brands, and are taking steps to extend and build on them.

Read the full release.

Webinar: Why not Use Your Content to Build YOUR Brand?

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:44:00 +0000

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 content under their own names. In the process, we're helping to ensure a bright future for credible, content-based brands. We'd welcome the opportunity to show how we can do that for yours.

Session begins Friday, May 21 at 1pm EDT.

The Best Freaking Web Browsing Machine Ever

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:19:00 +0000

Contrary to our recent post, we do not actually believe Apple intended the iPad as a Tizra viewer. For all the talk of Apps and iBooks, the iPad's real significance is that it does a better job than anything we've yet seen of lowering barriers to using the web.

You don't have to wait for it to boot up, it doesn't need to be recharged all the time, is small enough to keep on you most of the time, but is big enough that you don't have to squint or scroll too much when reading and can fit enough of your fingers on it to type reasonably well. Plus its touchscreen is intuitive enough and response is fast enough that you don't lose your train of thought while getting from one place to another. As Tim Bray says, "speed is a feature."

All these things come together to create something that enables us to work the web—with all its incredible power to inform and facilitate interaction—into more and more of the corners of our lives where it didn't fit before. Those places where there would be that awkward pause in the conversation while you stooped and moused around on your laptop to find that thing you wanted to show someone. Those places where people would say "yeah, but you can't use it while you're…[under the hood of your car, out in the field with a client, lying on a scaffold under the Sistine ceiling, etc.]"

We're still not ready to take it into the bathtub, but this is just the beginning. Apple's done a great job of finally making the idea of a tablet computer real and practical. Others will follow, and who knows how long it'll be before people think WWW stands for Works When Wet?

iPad Mania: Thanks, Apple for Making Such a Great Tizra Viewing Device

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 15:39:00 +0000

We were in line with everyone else at the Apple Store this morning, eager to see how the sites our customers have built on Tizra would look on the iPad's web browser. The verdict? Fast, easy and beautiful. A great new way to search and access content on Tizra-powered sites (and anywhere else on the web).

Thanks, Apple!

Browser thumbnails present a smörgåsbord of Tizra-powered sites.

A page from Document Engineering on the the MIT Press CISnet site.

An appetizing page from eat.shop sf bay area.

Search results on the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation's Tizra site.

As always, Tizra's search takes you direct to the exact page of the document you're looking for.

A Postcard from Tools of Change

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:20:00 +0000

Think back to the summer of 2007. The first iPhones are just hitting the stores. Kindle is still a gleam in Jeff Bezos' eye. And in the words of Publishers Weekly, "a festival of practical geekery" is taking place in San Jose, CA.

That festival was the first Tools of Change for Publishing conference. We were there, of course. And while comparatively small, it was the largest gathering we'd found of people who cared as much as we did about the transition from print to digital books.

That's still true today, which is why I'm excited to be on the floor of ToC 2010 as I write this. The show's a lot bigger now, and has spread beyond its geeky roots to focus on seismic shifts we're all aware of…the explosion of handheld devices, social software and changes in the ways all of us find and use information.

If you're here, come see us. We'll be in booth 114 with our partners Digital Divide Data, and you can always reach us via our contact form. If you're not here, we'll be posting updates on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/tizra

We believe change is not only good, it's constant, and we're looking forward to what comes next.

Rhode Island Releases Green Economy Plans on Tizra

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:20:00 +0000

You may have read that Rhode Island's making a serious push to establish itself as a hub of innovation and economic growth in the green energy sector. At the core of this effort is a document called "A Roadmap for Advancing the Green Economy in Rhode Island," which was unveiled today by Governor Carcieri, Senate President Paiva Weed and RIEDC Executive Director Stokes at an invitation-only event keynoted by retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark.

Perhaps less well known is the fact that the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation tapped Tizra to deliver the document, which can be found on their website at…

http://publications.riedc.com/view/qe2ne/default

It's a great example of how an organization can simultaneously provide faster and easier access to information, while simultaneously fostering local economic development, and preserving natural resources that might otherwise go into printing hundreds of copies of the document. Or for all you P-Bruins fans, you could call, it a hat-trick—three goals scored by the RIEDC!

What's Bigger than Amazon, Google, Microsoft & Apple?

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:31:00 +0000

The web.

Duh. But with Apple's anticipated Tablet [Update: iPad!], Google's Nexus One phone and any number of other shiny objects to distract us, it's easy to forget that even the most massively successful of these platforms—the iPhone—has maybe 60 million users, whereas the web has about 1 billion.

Maybe this is why the Nexus One's tagline is "web meets phone," and why even though few really know what capabilities Apple's long-rumored tablet will have, it's a safe bet it will feature a great web browser just like the iPhone does.

The simple reason is that the web is simply too big for even the biggest device makers to ignore.

Which is very good news for those of us looking for the best ways to reach large audiences with digital content. The fact that all these great companies are coming out with more great devices just means more ways for users to access the content we serve.

As long as open web standards prevail, those of us who stick with them don't really have a horse in this race. In fact, just the fact that there is a race means we win.

MIT Press Webinar Video & Slides Now Available

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:39:00 +0000

Thanks to all who participated in last week's webinar, and to MIT Press for a presentation that drew fantastic attendance and uniformly favorable comments. Video of the full presentation is below. Slides are available for download in PPT and PDF formats.

Free MIT Press Webinar: Building an Ebook Site with Tizra

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:35:00 +0000

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.

Association of Research Libraries Goes Live with Tizra

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:37:00 +0000

After extensive internal testing, the Association of Research Libraries has begun offering recent issues of its flagship publication on a public test site hosted by Tizra.

The organization announced recently that Research Library Issues is now available in full-text searchable form at…

http://publications.arl.org

We're thrilled about this, not only because because it's a vote of confidence from a high profile organization, but also because ARL's membership includes some of the most prestigious research institutions in the world (including the libraries of MIT and Indiana University, whose presses are already using Tizra).

In addition to greater production efficiency and flexibility, ARL's use of Tizra stems from a desire to provide members with capabilities including…

Better full-text search.
More targeted references via social software and other links.
Better compatibility with web enabled mobile devices like the iPhone.

We are proud to count ARL—and RLI readers—among the users of Tizra!

Faster than Google!

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:42:00 +0000

Don't get us wrong. We love Google, as anyone who remembers what web search used to be like in the days of AltaVista, Excite and even the World Wide Web Worm has to do. But there are certain things even Google doesn't do particularly well, particularly taking users to the relevant part of a long document...without long downloads and repeat searches.

Here's a quick video showing how Tizra solves this problem (among many others), based on actual experience we had looking up our trademark on the official US Patent and Trademark Office site.

Note: Click the little TV icon above to see it big!

Tizra gets faster

noreply@blogger.com (David G. Durand) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:26:00 +0000

Non-technical summary: things are lots faster at Tizra sites and admin tools. There's certainly more to do, but we've got more tricks up our sleeves! Because the big current speed boost is related to one cause, and it took me a while to track down, the geek appendage to this post describes what we found and how we fixed it.

Geekly details

I spent a bunch of time last week looking at system performance. As we've been adding customers and usage, we were beginning to feel the pinch. Performance always varies, but the range of response times was getting wider as things slowed, leading me to think that there might be some systemic issues that would give us a quick improvement (and indeed there was some Linux tuning that helped a bit). But data access seemed to be the real issue, so I spent a bunch of time looking into hibernate, and our caching and querying, and then wound up spending a day or so basically watching all the queries go through Postgres. And you know what? most of them seemed much slower than they should be, even though they are pretty hairy.

Of course, the next step was to check for database indexes, and how the query plans were using them. But in hand testing the plans looked good, and the indexes were sensible. But when run by hand the queries were also significantly faster than when hibernate ran them! This was much easier to see now that we have a live load, which is inevitably different from a test setup. So why the difference? Postgres was ignoring our indexes only when Tizra publisher made the queries.

Turns out that there's an old bug in Postgres where it would ignore indexes on bigint fields in prepared statements unless there was an explicit data type cast. (That type confusion was an obscure result of skew between Postgresql and the SQL standard.) And that was the behavior I was seeing, even though we were using a much more recent vintage of all the software. This was terrible for us, because we have a multi-tenant publishing system for large document collections and we use bigints as primary object identifiers!

So, why the old problem if the bug is gone, and we are not using postgres 7? It turns out that we dynamically build those hairy queries, in HQL (hibernate query language), using the String trick. But nowadays instead of making your indexes work, it breaks them! The differences are invisible in the SQL. It turned out that we were in a version "donut hole." Our database was recent enough so the String trick worked the opposite way (preventing fast queries for our prepared statements), but the JDBC driver wasn't making the calls in the right way to make the old trick work. End result: we're now running the latest JDBC driver with compatibility options set while we update our hairy query generator. And now we can really start tuning our setup!

If the web had not provided the history of the old bug, I would have had a much worse time even knowing where to look to find our somewhat subtle configuration issue. So enjoy the speedup, I sure am!

The New, 2009 1/7 Tizra

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Right now, our favorite thing about being a Software as a Service company is we can upgrade Tizra Publisher whenever we think it's right, without regard to ship dates or marketing rollouts. Or as the old Beetle ad said: "When we find a way to improve the Volkswagen, we do it. Then and there."

It's been less than a month since we announced instant web signups for Tizra Publisher, but we've already found several ways to improve. So we upgraded our software. Then and there.

A few hightlights...

Downloadable Chapters & Subsections

Tizra Publisher has always let you break documents up into smaller chunks, such as chapters, which can be sold or distributed independently, or remixed into new online products or collections. Now this capability is even more useful because you can let your users download the chunks for offline reading or printing. Each download is watermarked with your site's address, so there's no forgetting where they got it!

Here's how it looks on the CISnet site MIT Press runs on Tizra Publisher.

Note that while in this case, MIT Press is using it to provide free samples, it works just as well for paid or access-controlled content.

More Control Over Who Sees What

If you're selling eBooks, you want the world to know what's in your catalog (while of course controlling full-text access), but if you're doing enterprise knowledgement management, or you're a consultant or other professional services firm distributing documents to clients, you have to be more picky. For these applications, we recently added the ability to selectively suppress display of documents in title listings and searches. For example, if you're a law firm sharing documents with a client, no one else will even know those documents exist.

To use the feature, you just tag users to put them into groups, then select which groups you want a given document to be visible to. Below you can see the controls set to limit visibility of a document to a group called "Investors."

To ToC or not to ToC?

For long documents, like the 910-pager from the New York Botanical Garden Press shown below, Tizra's ability to automatically create web Tables of Contents is a boon...just upload a bookmarked PDF, and bam, you've created an easy browsing experience for your users. But if your document's just a few pages, who needs a ToC? Now you have the choice. Just say No to the Display Table of Contents option, and your users will go straight to page 1 with no unnecessary stops.

REST API & Other Power Tools

Many of the organizations we work with already have ecommerce, access-control, or related web capabilities in place, so we've added a straightforward, standards-based REST API, which enables those systems to exchange information with Tizra Publisher to create seamless end user experiences. For example, if you already have a database of users, your developers can set things up so those users can access content you host on Tizra Publisher without a separate sign-on. Same holds true if you want to sell Tizra-hosted products via your own shopping cart software.

Other new features for power users, include macros that let you selectively display information to users based on their login status, membership in user groups...even what browser software they're using.

It boils down to a package of capabilities that's not only very easy to get started with, but like the old Beetle, can take you a long way very economically.

TAKE IT FOR A FREE TEST DRIVE NOW!

Online Publishing for Tough Times

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:15:00 +0000

"I didn't invent the rainy day, man. I just own the best umbrella"
Almost Famous

In an economic climate that led Publishers Weekly to predict 2009 would be "the worst year for publishing in decades," eBook sales are growing at more than 100% a year, according to the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF).

We think it's time more content owners—both inside and outside the traditional publishing industry—had access to serious online publishing tools that will open up this kind of opportunity. That's why we're rolling out free, self-service signups to Tizra Publisher. This is the same software that MIT Press is using to sell a collection of more than 170 computer science books on its CISnet site, and you can get your hands on it right now…

FREE 60 SECOND SIGNUP

If you'd like to learn a bit more, here's quick overview of what Tizra Publisher can do (click the little TV icon at the bottom to see it big!).

This Weds: Come see us at Providence Geeks!

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 20:15:00 +0000

Later this week, Tizra's presenting at the Providence Geek Dinner:

Wed., Dec 17
5:30-9pm
AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence, RI

We'll be demoing new features of Tizra Publisher, and discussing some of the mindblowing work our CTO Francisco Rosa has been doing behind the scenes. We've been big fans of the Geek Dinner since its early days (we gave a sneak preview of our software at one of the very first ones) and hope we'll see you there.

PS: We also hope you'll bring something for the Geeks for Good canned food drive!

AppGap: Tizra more than just a "great tool for content sellers"

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:13:00 +0000

Bill Ives has been writing about knowledge management since the days when for most people that meant color coding your files, so we were really pleased when he agreed to evaluate Tizra Publisher in The AppGap, a blog on the future of work. We were even more pleased when he said "I see this service as a great tool for content sellers."

But we thought his keenest insight was into applications beyond traditional publishing...

[Tizra Publisher] can also be a useful content distribution system for enterprises that need to manage the presentation of their information. This will be especially useful for verticals with a lot of internal content such as legal firms, pharma, and other research oriented enterprises.

Ives saw Tizra's combination of easy and yet precisely controlled content distribution as key for these users, and others needing to share marketing and technical information.

Read the full review.