Tizra Blog

News Release: Tizra Announces an Open Platform for Interactive Publishing at Tools of Change

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:20:00 +0000

Web-based software lets publishers build interaction and community around their content, without being locked into proprietary tools and devices.

February 13, 2013 (New York, NY)--Tizra announced today at the O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference a combination of upgraded user interfaces and content management tools that provide publishers with a new option for publishing interactive digital content. The system builds on the open standards of the web, providing an alternative to proprietary "walled garden" systems, which require publishers to commit to authoring tools, viewing devices and distribution channels controlled by specific vendors.

New viewer puts multimedia in context.

The new platform being demonstrated at the conference includes a completely re-designed web-based content viewing interface, which improves usability and compatibility across all the most popular web browsers and viewing devices, as well as enhanced linking and the ability to deliver access-controlled files in any digital format.

"Our belief is that it's critical for publishers to be able to reach their readers directly on whatever devices those readers are comfortable with, and to be able to create content with the tools that work best for their authors and creative teams," says Tizra CEO David Durand. "Tizra's approach is to make everything we do compatible with the web and other open standards, so publishers have access to the biggest audience and the best tools."

Tizra's commitment to empowering publishers and authors in the development of vibrant online communities around their content recently prompted O'Reilly General Manager & Publisher Joe Wikert to write that the company supports "exactly the habits that publishers need to develop in order to build successful digital businesses." Full text of his remarks is available at...

http://toc.oreilly.com/2012/11/tizras-web-based-publishing-platform.html

About Tizra
Tizra's powerful, proven web application makes it easy to sell eBooks and other digital content direct to readers, with unparalleled flexibility. Combining an intuitive web control panel with uniquely integrated content remixing, ecommerce, SEO and web design capabilities, Tizra empowers content owners to respond quickly to market feedback and build brands that will hold up over the long haul. The company is headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, and funded in part by Rhode Island's Slater Technology Fund. More at http://tizra.com.

Tools of Change 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Winchild) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 19:58:00 +0000

Tizra is thrilled to once again be exhibiting at the Tools of Change for Publishers Conference, February 12-14, 2013. Please visit us at booth TT 7. Also, feel free to take advantage of our exhibitor discount, by registering with this Discount Code: TIZRA25.

ToC has always been a great event for Tizra. We were there the first time the event was held in 2007. And just a couple of months ago, we were recognized by conference chair Joe Wikert as a tool that empowers publishers to reach readers directly.

We love being surrounded by incredibly smart people who share our passion for the world of digital publishing. And what a world it's become!

The population of e-book readers is growing. In the past year, the number of those who read e-books increased from 16% to 23%. And this move toward e-book reading coincides with an increase in ownership of tablets and other electronic book reading devices, growing from 18% to 33%. Digital publishing is branching out, with companies like The New York Times, USA Today, TIME Inc, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair -- among others -- publishing their own ebook content. What better time to connect and see each other through all this amazing change?

If you won't be able to make the ToC conference this year, you can always follow our twitter feed at twitter.com/tizra as we'll be tweeting from floor.

Here's to connecting soon and cheers to another great year at Tools of Change!

Increasing Conversions with Google Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Winchild) — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 18:19:00 +0000

Google Analytics funnel
visualization helps you see
where your users are dropping out
of the checkout flow.

One of the key benefits of digital publishing with Tizra is that you have direct access to exceptionally detailed information about how people are interacting with your content using standard web analytics tools. Because Tizra treats every page of every document as a separate web page, you know not only which publications are popular, but which PARTS of those publications are getting the most traffic.

It’s a great opportunity to learn more about your users, and to understand the basic forces driving the success of your online publishing efforts. Plus it’s easy (not to mention addictive), and there are some great free tools available to help.

In this post, we’ll provide step-by-step instructions on setting up Google Analytics to work with your Tizra account, and drill down on the Google Analytics Goals features that are particularly useful in measuring the success of your promotional efforts.

In case you’re not familiar with web analytics, it's basically about recording and analyzing information that web browsers send when they request content from a website. Some of the key metrics you can track include…

Pages viewed: Lets you see the relative popularity of each page on your site. This is where Tizra’s highly granular content delivery provides special advantages.
Visits: Number of visits (or more precisely, user sessions) on your site within a given period.
Visitors: Number of individual people (browsers).
Pageviews: Total number of pages viewed by users.
Pages/Visit: Average number of pages requested each time someone visits your site. Useful in determining how engaged users are with your content.
Sources: How people are finding their way to your site, including links from other sites, social media and search engines like Google.

Of course, the most important metric for many publishers is, How many users are buying my content, or registering on my site? To help with this, Google Analytics has a powerful feature called Goals. Goals make it easy for you to keep track of these key measures of success, and help you backtrack so you can understand where your successes are coming from, and pinpoint problems that may be preventing users from converting.

So, for example, a Goals report might show that 100 users landed on an offer page for a particular ebook. From there, three users added the offer to their shopping cart; two initiated a credit card purchase; and one sale went all the way through. With these analytics in hand, Tizra’s flexibility then makes it easy for you to improve whatever part of the process is not working.

For example, maybe you want to experiment with changing the aforementioned offer so that more visits to the ebook’s offer are converted into sales. You might decide to experiment with a 3-tiered pricing structure: one price for one month of online access; another price for one year of online access; and a third price for perpetual online access with a PDF chapter download included. Whatever types of changes you decide to make, Tizra makes them easy to do quickly, and Analytics Goals help you continue to make informed decisions about what changes are most effective.

Setting Up Google Analytics -- Step-by-Step

Visit Google Analytics website to sign up for a new account. Click the Create Account button and follow the on-screen instructions.
After you’ve filled out all the fields on the What would you like to track screen, click the Get Tracking ID button at the bottom of the page.
Copy the Google Analytics Tracking ID onto the clipboard.
The Tracking ID is formatted as: UA-XXXXXXXX-Y.

Note: Once your Google Analytics Account is set up, you can find the Tracking ID by clicking the Admin button in the upper right corner of any Google Analytics screen, then selecting the appropriate Google Analytics account property, and then clicking the Tracking Info tab.
Next, open up Tizra and from the control panel, go to REPORTING > Google Analytics Reporting.
Take what you copied in step 3 and paste it into the Tracking Code field.
Optionally, you can add a Description to the Tracking Code, which might include information about who set up the account and when.

Note: Tizra can be set up to support tracking from multiple Google Analytics Account Profiles, which is useful if there are different departments within your organization that need separate access to data.

Bear in mind that when you add new Profiles, they don't include retrospective data, so you'll want to have at least one with continuity all the way back to the beginning.
Click Save at the bottom of the Tizra screen.
Google Analytics will typically have reporting available within 24 hours.

Setting Up Google Analytics Goals

Click the Admin button at the top right of any Google Analytics screen.
On the Account Administration screen, click the appropriate Account name.
If you have a lot of Accounts or Properties, use the search field above the Account name(s).
From the list of Account Properties, select the appropriate Property.
When you set up your new Account, you also added the web site Property you wished to see reports for. You can optionally add additional Properties.
From the Profiles list, select the Profile you want to add the Goal to.

Note: A Profile lets you "define which data is available from your web site Property, and also specify a list of users who can see that data in reports. The first Profile that Analytics creates for a web site Property has no filters, so all your data is available in at least one profile. Create additional profiles and filter the data for those profiles as necessary."
Click the Goals tab from the Profiles menu.
Click +Goal to add a goal to one of the Goal sets.
Enter the values in the fields as listed (and pictured) below:
Goal Name: Successfully Complete Purchase
Goal Type: URL
Goal URL: /commerce/success
Match Type: Head Match
Case Sensitive: <unchecked>
Goal Value: <leave blank>

Note: If you would like to track conversions for a particular purchase Offer, you can append the Offer ID to the end of the Goal URL. For example, if the Offer ID was 1234, the Goal URL would be /commerce/success/1234. (The Offer ID can be found on the Offer Properties screen in parentheses.)
Enter the values in the fields as listed (and pictured) below:
URL: /commerce/step1Name: 1-Arrive at Payment Form
Required step: <check the box>
Click +Goal Funnel Step.
Complete the newly displayed Step 2 fields as follows:
URL: /commerce/step2Name: 2-Arrive at Confirmation Page
Click the Save button to save your Goal and two Funnels.
To view your Goals Analytics, click the Standard Reporting tab and ten click the Conversions section of the left-hand menu. Select from that menu the Goal Reporting you'd like to view.

Our Superficial Review of Surface: It Works with Tizra!

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:49:00 +0000

The new Microsoft Surface tablet was on the doorstep at Tizra HQ this morning, and we took a little time to run it through some basic tests. Overall, our feeling was in line with the reviews: Nice hardware, and potentially attractive for those looking for a more mobile way to use MS Office. Still a ways to go on software, though.

We tried the Windows RT version of Internet Explorer 10 on a few Tizra sites, and overall they worked as expected, though interactions with the new reading interface we've just developed (more on this soon) were sluggish. Part of it may be incompatibility with some underlying scripts, which will be tuned as IE 10 becomes more of a factor. Part of it was probably just our unfamiliarity with new Metro interface.

So for now, our minds are open on Surface as a device, but more importantly, we're thrilled to see another major player striving mightily to develop better ways for users to interact with the great content our customers deliver through Tizra.

Tizra Gets Logical

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Winchild) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:16:00 +0000

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 in your textbook," it means the same thing as when they post this link in their Learning Management System.

The feature is simple to use, because it takes advantage of the page numbering features already built into the standards for the PDF file format. Once the feature is activated on your Tizra site, any PDF you load with logical page numbering in it will automatically be displayed with that numbering in Tizra's online reader and tables of contents.

How you get the required information into your PDFs will depend on your software, but it's generally a matter of a few clicks. For example in Adobe Acrobat, you can select a range of pages in the thumbnail view, then right click to pop up the page numbering dialog, which lets you specify how those pages should be numbered.

Once that's done, Tizra can import the logical page numbers and display them on your site, as in the table of contents below (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Click on the table of contents heading Introduction (Figure 1, above) and the Tizra online content reader (Figure 2, below) displays Page iii (of 10), where "iii" is the logical/printed page number and "10" is the total number of pages in the PDF.
Note the printed page number circled in the bottom right-hand corner of the page.

Figure 2

You can even jump to logical page numbers (as always, if users have access to the page). For example: entering "iv" in the Go field (Figure 3) will bring the reader to logical/printed page number iv.

Figure 3

To get started with logical page numbering, please contact Tizra.

Tizra is at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Winchild) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:02:00 +0000

Tizra is in Germany! On Tuesday, October 9th, we are at the Tools of Change Frankfurt Conference.

For the rest of the week -- Wednesday, October 10th through Sunday, October 14th -- you can find us at the Frankfurt Book Fair, at the American Collective Stand - Hall 8.0 S949.

If you are also in Frankfurt, we'd love to connect! Please email or call us at +1 401-400-2989 and we'll happily set up some time.

Hope to see you there.

Entrance to the Frankfurt Book Fair "Festhalle."

Make Your Own Marketing Widgets!

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Winchild) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 13:11:00 +0000

How LAB-AIDS is using the new widgets.

Tizra now offers a Widget viewing mode that lets you embed your content in just about any standard web page just by inserting a little blob of HTML code. It's great for letting users "leaf through" samples of your content without interrupting what they're doing...whether that's perusing your online book catalog, reading a review, or as you'll see below, enjoying a fascinating blog post like this! It enables you to disseminate promotional samples widely via viral or conventional marketing campaigns, and to make the online shopping and buying experience as seamless and integrated as possible.

For example, say you were a well-known Tizra customer like Gibbs Smith Education. You could give bloggers a simple snippet of code that would let them show their readers a thumbnail-sized sample of one of your beautiful books like this...

To let them see it at full size, you could put a little link like this underneath.

All that's needed to embed the above sample is a little blob of code like this...

<iframe src="http://s45273646-sample.tizrapublisher.com/Utah_Our_Home_Student_Edition/3?zoomFactor=0.255" style="width:240px;height:326px;background-color:#fff;"></iframe>

The web monkeys among you will immediately recognize it as plain old HTML that'll work just about anywhere. This means it's easy for anyone with minimal web skills to spread the word about your content.

It also means web designers can customize the widgets without learning anything new. With a few tweaks, samples can be made bigger, smaller, given decorative borders, or otherwise tailored to fit their surroundings. Say you wanted to distribute a bigger sample, like this from Goodheart-Willcox, and frame it in orange...

Cooking Up Your Own Widgets

To create one of these blobs of code, you start with a pair of standard iframe tags, like this...

<iframe></iframe>

To indicate which content you want included in the sample, you use a special version of the Tizra URL for that content (to open up access to the content, you'll need admin privileges on a Tizra account and knowledge of the basic access control tools). The URL is similar to the ones used to preview content in the private staging area of a Tizra site, but with a slight twist. If the staging variant looked like this...

http://s45273646-preview.tizrapublisher.com/Utah_Our_Home_Student_Edition/3

...the version to use in your widget would look like this...

http://s45273646-sample.tizrapublisher.com/Utah_Our_Home_Student_Edition/3

...with the only difference being that "sample" is used in place of "preview."

Once you have the URL, you stick it into the iframe markup like this...

<iframe src="http://s45273646-sample.tizrapublisher.com/Utah_Our_Home_Student_Edition/3"></iframe>

From here, it's all about tweaking the cosmetics. First you'll probably want to set the size of the iframe (essentially the window inside which your content will be displayed). You can do that through standard HTML. For example, you'd set it to 240 pixels wide by 326 pixels wide like this...

<iframe src="http://s45273646-sample.tizrapublisher.com/Utah_Our_Home_Student_Edition/3" style="width: 240px; height: 326px;"></iframe>

You can change the size of the page images that appear inside the iframe by adding a zoom factor to the end of the URL like this...

<iframe src="http://s45273646-sample.tizrapublisher.com/Utah_Our_Home_Student_Edition/3?zoomFactor=0.255" style="width: 240px; height: 326px;"></iframe>

Increment the number up for bigger, down for smaller.

Then you can decorate to your heart's content, say by adding a white background to bleed out to the edge of the iframe, and a nice crisp black border...

Customizable RSS Feeds

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Winchild) — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:11:00 +0000

Do you use RSS feeds? Then you know how useful they can be when you want alerts to newly published online information that applies to you: professionally or personally. This kind of targeted, agile publishing is exactly what Tizra is all about and, as you'd expect, we offer simple yet flexible features that let you get the most relevant updates out to your most interested users.

In case you're unfamiliar with RSS, it's basically a way of formatting information so that people can subscribe to and view it in feed reading software (Details from Wikipedia). RSS means users save time because they're notified of anything new at their favorite sites without needing to visit them.

Tizra RSS feeds can be linked to from the homepage of your Tizra site, or any other web page.

By default, Tizra sites include an RSS feed that updates subscribers every time any new Document is added. For example, here's a feed that'll update you any time Columbia University Press adds a book to the CUPOLA site they run on Tizra...

http://cupola.columbia.edu/~rss

The recipe for this is simple: Just take the domain name for the site (cupola.columbia.edu) and add ~rss at the end.

Customizing RSS Feeds:

You can customize the default feed just by adding a few parameters at the end of its URL. Following are a few examples.

Collection Feed
Say you're only interested in Columbia's Business and Economics collection. You'd start with the URL for the collection (http://cupola.columbia.edu/tdprp/) and add the ~rss to get...

http://cupola.columbia.edu/tdprp/~rss

Excerpt Feed
One of the really interesting things about the way Tizra lets you work with content is that you can unbundle Documents into shorter chunks called Excerpts, which can then be rebundled with other content. These Excerpts can be the basis of feeds, too. For example, The Association of Research Libraries breaks up each issue of its publication Research Library Issues into Excerpts—one for each article—and generates a feed like this...

http://publications.arl.org/all_rli_articles/~rss?metaTypeName=PageRange

By adding ?metaTypeName=PageRange at the end, the feed is switched to list Excerpts, rather than whole Documents. This makes sense in a lot of cases like this, where users will probably find it more interesting to see the titles of each article in their feed reader, rather than just being informed that a new issue has come out. Note: It's also possible to generate an Excerpt feed by using the Collection approach above. Just configure the Collection to include Excerpts (or a combination of Excerpts & Documents) and the feed that's created by adding ~rss to the URL will include whatever's in the Collection.

Tag-Based Feed
You can also create a more free-form feed that will update users any time you apply a certain tag to your content. For example, here's a feed containing everything with the "Automotive" tag on the Goodheart-Willcox Online Textbooks site...

http://www.g-wonlinetextbooks.com/~rss?AdminTags=Automotive

These are just a few examples...by no means comprehensive. You could also do things like generate a feed with all the works of a particular author, update conference participants any time new items are added to a particular session, limit the number of items in a feed. Drop us a note, and we'll be glad to discuss in more detail.

Look...up in the sky! It's Super Tagger!

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Winchild) — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 14:05:00 +0000

The Super Tagger feature gives you superhero-like powers to update -- in bulk -- the metadata properties of the content you manage in Tizra, including Documents, Excerpts, Collections, Virtual Collections, Static Pages and Offers.

It also gives you the all too human power to change your mind, make mistakes, and learn as you go. Because it lets you make large-scale changes after you load your content, you no longer have to worry so much about getting your metadata just right beforehand. If you suddenly realize you'd like to bundle your recipes by main ingredient, or your conference papers by first author's organization, you don't have to start over, you can Super Tag them!

It can be especially useful for educational publishers working to make use of the new metadata standards being proposed by the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative and the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

For example, one of the proposed LRMI standards is to include the typical age range of the content’s intended end user. You could add a metadata field to your Documents called "Typical Age Range," filter on all types of Content for a particular age range, and then use the Super Tagger to add the age range to all the applicable Documents.

Step-by-step instructions for using the Super Tagger:

Note: If you want to populate a new metadata field using the Super Tagger feature, be sure to add that metadata field to your Documents, Excerpts, Collections, etc. using the New Property feature before proceeding with these instructions.

From the Tizra Control Panel click on CONTENT and then go to Documents, Excerpts, Collections, Virtual Collections, Static Pages, Offers, or Excerpt Offers.
Filter on the Content (Documents, Excerpts, Collections, etc.) you wish to update (only filter if you are not updating ALL of this particular type of Content).

Filtering is useful when your Tizra Publisher site has hundreds or thousands of content items, because it enables you to narrow the list to just the items you want to work with.
Select the empty box at the top of the Content List to select all.
Click the Super Tagger button.
The Super Tagger dialog box will open, displaying all metadata fields for the selected Content type (Documents, Excerpts, Collections, etc.). Use the scroll bar on the right-hand side of the dialog box to see additional metadata fields.

Note: The type of metadata field (true/false, keyword list, string, etc.) will determine which Super Tagger options are available to you in the drop-down list underneath each metadata field.
Leave the default selection of "ignore" if you do not wish to change that particular metadata field.
~OR~
Select one of the following options from the drop-down list.

We've outlined the options for some of the more popular metadata types.

For String fields:
Select Replace from the drop-down list and then enter the new value in the blank field. Or, if you are working with Excerpts and you wish to pull the values in from each Excerpt's parent Document, simply select Add Values from Parent from the drop-down list.

For True/False fields:
Select Replace from the drop-down list and then select the Yes or No radio button. Or, if you are working with Excerpts and you wish to pull the True/False setting from each Excerpt's parent Document, simply select Add Values from Parent from the drop-down list.

For Keyword Lists:The process for REPLACING Keyword List values is described step-by-step along with screen shots. The remaining Keyword List options: Add Values, Remove Values and Add Values from Parent are also described, but without screen shots, as the processes are similar.

To REPLACE ALL existing Keyword values with a new value, select Replace from the drop-down list.

Click into the blank field beneath the drop-down list.

The Picker screen will open.

Enter a New Value and then click the Add button.

Click the X in the bottom right-hand corner to exit the Picker screen.

The newly added value will display back on the Super Tagger dialog box.

Proceed to Step 7 below.

OR, if you wish to ADD a new Keyword value to any existing values, select Add Values from the drop-down list.

Click into the blank field to open the Picker screen; enter the New Value; click the Add button; click the X in the bottom right-hand corner to exit the Picker screen; and then proceed to Step 7 below.

OR, if you wish to REMOVE any existing Keyword value(s), select RemoveValues from the drop-down list.

Click into the blank field to open the Picker screen; click on any existing Value(s) you wish to remove; click the X in the bottom right-hand corner to exit the Picker screen; and then proceed to Step 7 below.

Or, If you are working with Excerpts and you wish to pull the values in from each Excerpt's parent Document, simply select Add Values from Parent and then proceed to Step 7 below.
Click the Update Fields button on the Super Tagger dialog box. All applicable metadata fields will be updated!

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.