Tizra Blog

Tizra and Chicago Distribution Center to partner

noreply@blogger.com (David G. Durand) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:52:00 +0000

We're really excited to announce a collaboration with the University of Chicago Press's Chicago Distribution Center to offer online publishing services.

It's silly to quote a press release in a blog, so I advise you to read about it here.

MIT Press Teams with Tizra to Build an Online Computer Science Library

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:00:00 +0000

The headline says it all. Details in the press release.

TidBITS Signs with Tizra

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:25:00 +0000

We honestly didn't intend for this blog to degenerate into a rah-rah series of signing announcements, but gosh, there's been an awful lot of that lately! The latest is TidBITS, a truly pioneering publisher of books for Mac users (and, yes, we described them that way before they became a customer).

Even if you're not a Mac user, you have to appreciate a company that's been publishing online continuously since 1990. For TidBITS, online distribution is the core of their business, not some new add-on. The Take Control ebooks, which they'll be publishing via Agile PDF, were written, edited and designed from the outset as digital products. They're a great example of information packaged and priced based purely on what readers want and will buy, regardless of traditional print constraints like what size clump of physical pages it's economical to manufacture and distribute.

We think this approach makes TidBITS a great partner for us…they're already thinking along just the lines that Agile PDF was designed to support! It's also interesting that they've chosen to distribute their ebooks in PDF—the first format we decided on as well. Unlike many publishers, their reasoning has nothing to do with the fact PDF is an easy byproduct of print production. They like PDF on its own merits—it gives them design control that lets them optimize pages for on-screen reading, yet supports features like linking and searching. We're really excited about what will happen when these features are combined with the those added by Agile PDF.

The Satisfactions of Matchmaking

noreply@blogger.com (Anne Orens) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:31:00 +0000

As a company with a newly launched service we're naturally looking for partners whose services complement ours, and who can recommend us to their customers. At least that's how we assumed it would work. But recently we were in the fortunate position of being able to turn the tables by playing the matchmaker between Bibliovault, a leading provider of highly complementary digital conversion and archiving services, and one of our newest customers, New York Botanical Garden Press.

Founded in 1896, The New York Botanical Garden Press has one of the largest publishing programs of any botanical garden in the world, and, as you can imagine, unique print titles waiting for online exposure. Tizra had already been accepting bulk transfers of book content from Bibliovault on behalf of Duke University Press, making the uploading and data management process seamless.

So when The NYBG Press talked to us about their need for a reliable partner to facilitate print and digital distribution, we immediately thought of Bibliovault. Not only do they have the technical expertise to convert print to digital files optimized for online distribution, but they have an outstanding reputation for preserving valuable print content. It’s a win all the way around, and we’re looking forward to helping The NYBG Press make the most of Bibliovault’s services.

The New York Botanical Garden Press Signs with Tizra

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:29:00 +0000

Famed for its plant collections, architecture and setting, The New York Botanical Garden is not only an exceptionally beautiful place, but a place for cutting edge research. The New York Botanical Garden Press communicates discoveries made there and elsewhere, and with three journals, five book series and more than 200 books, it is one of the largest publishers at any botanical garden in the world.

We're thrilled to announce that this renowned institution has chosen to begin making its publications available online with Tizra's Agile PDF. It's pretty exciting when an organization that's been around since 1896 decides to work with one that's been around since 2006. But consistent with their forward thinking spirit, we get the sense they're pretty excited, too.

"I am convinced that online publishing is a key part of our future," said Nate Smith, associate director of the press. "We've wanted to make our books available online for years, but until now none of the options really made sense for us."

I'm sure we'll have much more to say about this partnership in the days ahead, but for now, it's hard to think of a more authoritative endorsement of the hard work that's gone into Agile PDF.

PS: As a bonus, we're hoping we may finally learn a bit more about the obscure Tizra plant, from which our company gets its name!

Yum! Tizra Eats Its Dogfood

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:00:00 +0000

We keep talking about how Agile PDF makes it easy for nontechnical users to do sophisticated online publishing. Well, tell a story like that long enough and people start to wonder why you're not doing it yourself. Besides, any product benefits when its designers and builders are also users. Software developers call it eating your own dogfood.

So a few nontechnical members of the Tizra team dug in (with Joya, pictured above, as menu advisor). We did it just they way any publisher would, applying our company branding with the Agile PDF control panel and basic CSS skills, then uploading PDFs. The only difference is we're not actually publishers, so we used files freely available on the web, and of course, we're giving them away rather than selling them.

Voila! The New Agile PDF Demo Site

Take a look. Then drop us a note, and we'll show how you can do the same—and a lot more—with your content. All of us, except maybe Joya, found it quite the best dogfood we'd ever tasted.

The Federation Press Chooses Agile PDF

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:24:00 +0000

We're happy to announce that The Federation Press, one of Australia's leading publishers of legal, social and academic journals and books, is now a Tizra customer and partner. It's especially validating because Federation clearly went out of their way, conducting an international search before settling on us, a new company on more or less the opposite side of the globe.

The decision seems typical of the independent, entrepreneurial, and yet pragmatic spirit Federation brings to publishing. With more than 400 books in print and twenty years in business, they're hardly upstarts, but they still place an emphasis on basics like efficient manuscript turnaround and quick order fulfillment. They're also a great fit with Tizra's innovative online publishing approach because of their international audience, and their focus on broadening access to traditionally esoteric topics through clear writing and creative marketing.

We look forward to helping Federation add an exciting new online chapter to their business!

Behind the Screens, Pt. 2--Customizing Site Design in Agile PDF

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:24:00 +0000

If you’ve seen some of the sites created with Agile PDF, you know how different they can look.

But how does this happen? In this second in our series on the Agile PDF web based control panel (first post here), we’ll show how easy it is to completely re-skin and restructure an Agile PDF site in a matter of hours.

First, a little slideshow of some recent results:

As in the first post, we’ll use the eat.shop guides from Cabazon Books as our example. Founded by a graphic designer, Cabazon has a strong visual identity and has done a great job reinforcing it across its print and online properties.

Step 1: Pick a design
While Agile PDF does provide pre-made templates for publishers to customize, Cabazon already had a site design they were happy with, and wanted to carry it over to the new online books site they were building on Agile PDF. Screens from the preexisting design they wanted to match:

Cabazon’s original eat.shop homepage.

Original purchase page for print books.

Step 2: Upload images
The first step in implementing the design on Agile PDF is to grab the GIFs and JPEGs created for the original site and upload them through the Agile PDF control panel, so they can be incorporated into the new web pages.

Uploading an image.

Step 3: Upload stylesheets
Like most sites, Cabazon’s existing design relied on standard cascading stylesheets for type, layout and other design information. These styles were imported into Agile PDF by uploading a CSS file.

Uploading CSS.

Step 4: Set up page structure
Agile PDF lets users build pages by arranging drag-and-drop Smart Blocks, rather than writing code. There are Smart Blocks for all of the dozens of page components and functions that can appear on an Agile PDF site, including Search, Login, Sales Promotions, Commerce, and even advertisements using Google AdWords. Watch the video to see how the components of the page used to display tables of contents for the eat.shop guides were dragged into place. Larger version here.

Click for larger video.

Step 5: We've got a match!
In just a few steps, we've matched Cabazon's design exactly and tied it in with the preexisting eat.shop site. Compare this new catalog of online books with their original printed book catalog back at the beginning of the post.

New online book purchase page...compare with original print version above.

Step 6: Experiment, learn, evolve.
So now Cabazon has extended two of its biggest assets—its content and its brand—into a new online presence based on Agile PDF.

Next: The really interesting part. Using Agile PDF's integrated commerce and content management tools to leverage those assets by unbinding, remixing and rebundling them into a new range of online products.

Behind the Screens, Pt. 1--Creating a Site With the New Agile PDF Control Panel

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:00:00 +0000

Now that it's public, we're excited to show the new Agile PDF web control panel in a bit more detail. To provide a real-world example, we'll show it in use building the eat.shop guides site for Cabazon Books, which went live a few weeks ago. While in practice the process is quick—with initial online selling capability available in a matter of minutes—there's a lot to the software, so we'll break it up over a few posts.

1. Upload a Document When you open your Agile PDF account, you're presented with the control panel homepage in your web browser. The cog dropdown provides quick access to key tasks from anywhere in the system. Start by using it to upload a PDF. In this case, it's the full 132 illustrated spreads for eat.shop nyc.

Note how the progress bar informs you as the system imports the file, extracts metadata, breaks the PDF into individual pages, and indexes it for full-text searchability. Apart from the upload, which of course is bandwidth dependent, it only takes a few seconds, but it's nice to know what's going on (beats the "click and pray" approach typical in web content management).

2. Verify metadata To minimize hand entry, metadata such as title, author and table of contents headings are extracted from documents that contain it. Any missing data can be entered through the control panel.

The second screen is a powerful outline editor used to manage table of contents entries extracted from the PDF bookmarks. The entries can be reordered indented, grouped, hidden from end users (but still saved for internal reference), and deleted.

3. Set sales terms Simply enter a price and promotional blurb, or if you want, test more sophisticated options like subscriptions based on variable duration or dates, pay-per-view, concurrencies (the number of users who can view your content at once) or multipacks (any X books from a given collection).

4. Stage and Publish Once the metadata's been reviewed, you can save it to the staging area, where the book can be checked in the context of the full web site exactly as it will appear to your users before being made public. Then click publish and your content is live!

5. Look what you've got! The book is online and part of the your own, customizable publishing web site, with a full complement of browse and search features, plus editable information pages that can be used to say more about the company and its products. Users can find their way to your content via Google and other search engines, see sales offers, buy content and use it over the web, including on handhelds like the iPhone.

Next up: Customizing design to match the eat.shop branding. Then, creating new products by breaking books down into subsections and gathering them up into collections.

The Demo That Wasn't and The Conference That Was

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:30:00 +0000

You may have noticed we were pretty excited about O'Reilly's Tools of Change conference, which is still going on through the end of today in New York. This is really the place for people who love books, digital technology and the things they can do for each other. Apparently the ranks of people like this are growing. Eight hundred attended this year's conference, compared with 200 last year, when our CEO David Durand gave his Tutorial on Digitizing your Backlist.

Overall, the show was all we could have hoped for. Underlying the rapid attendance growth is a general feeling that 2008 is the breakout year…the year books start to move online in the way other media have over the past dozen years. David Rothman, an influential blogger at Publishers Weekly had just written us up, and interest in our proposition was high.

We were especially excited because this year we were on the program to give a Lightning Demo of Agile PDF, including the first showing of a new control panel that makes creating a digital bookselling site easy, like setting up a blog or a Flickr account is easy. We'll be posting more details over the next day or so.

Unfortunately, the live presentation didn't go the way we planned. The Lightning Demo format allows each presenter exactly five minutes, which under the best of circumstances would be enough to show a tiny fraction of what Agile PDF can do. As it worked out, however, David's login to the demo system timed out while he was waiting to get on stage, and he barely got out of the gate.

That's the breaks of the demo game, but we were disappointed. We were sure (and subsequent one-on-ones bore out) that we had an absolute killer piece of software to show, and we wanted it to get the widest exposure possible.

We'll make up for it by posting screens from the demo here over the next few days (much more detailed than would have fit in the five minutes), and offering web based demos to anyone who contacts us.

Aside from all the interest from publisher prospects, one of my favorite moments came in a panel discussion including Rothman and Tonya Engst of TidBITS Publishing, a true digital pioneer. In response to the longstanding debate over how much ebooks should cost, she said "exactly as much as it takes to maximize revenue." That brought a murmur of approval from the room...including us. Publishers need to find their own answers to these questions, and we designed Agile PDF from the outset to help with that.

I was also pleased when in the same session veteran consultant Mike Shatzkin noted that based on his legwork almost all ebooks being bought nowadays are actually read on computers, despite the buzz about dedicated handhelds like Kindle. Further, he said that PDF was by far the dominant content format, over reader-specific formats, and he professed to be baffled as to why publishers would not sell the PDFs they already have as digital products.

We're glad to be baffled in such good company!

FEB 11: Catch our Lightning Demo at Tools of Change

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:05:00 +0000

When the first Agile PDF sites launched recently, we promised we'd be saying more soon about how the sites were built. Well, the first public demo is coming up at the O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference in NYC:

The Five-minute Publication Site—Part of the TOC Lightning Demos Series, February 11, 7:30-8:30pm, Broadway Ballroom

As the name suggests, we'll be showing just how quickly a publisher can move from PDF files to a flexible, customizable website selling digital content. And of course, if you've got a bit more than five minutes, we'd be happy to answer any questions. We'll be exhibiting immediately after the demos at the TOC Faire, and happy to talk at any point during the rest of the conference. Drop us a note at info@tizra.com.

Live demonstrations in Washington DC

noreply@blogger.com (Anne Orens) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:26:00 +0000

We’ll be in Washington DC next week, attending the Professional and Scholarly Publishers annual trade show and meeting with local D.C Publishers.

So come find me in the hallways, or I'll come to you in D.C. Better still, contact me (anne.orens@tizra.com) and bring a PDF with you to the meeting. I can provide an interactive showing of how Agile PDF manages your PDF and delivers online content.

For Those Unimpressed By Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 05:54:00 +0000

This personal blog post by Tizra CTO Francisco Rosa gives the hardcore technologist's view of why Agile PDF is different. He may not be in the marketing department, but it's safe to say he knows our software. He also knows how it matches up against expensive custom systems now in use elsewhere (he built a few for clients like Oxford University Press, McGraw-Hill and the World Bank before coming to Tizra).

We're Live

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:22:00 +0000

Congratulations to two publishing organizations that over the past couple of days became the first to go live with sites built using Tizra's Agile PDF:

The first is a fast-growing publisher of printed city guides with an emphasis on creative design and local flavor. The second is a web startup aiming to facilitate information sharing and growth in the burgeoning business of green construction.

As one look at the sites will tell you, they're two very different organizations. But both have taken an exciting first step toward new online publishing revenue.

Better yet, both are doing it their way, with complete control over their own products, brands and strategies. And they are doing it with none of the technology investment or lead time that traditional custom information commerce projects have required.

How? We'll begin taking the wraps off of that part in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, drop a note to info@tizra.com if you'd like to see how you can start selling content right now.

See You in London

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:39:00 +0000

David Durand and Anne Orens will be at the Online Information 2007 conference in London next week, giving demos and answering questions about Agile PDF, which is on track for its first public release in a matter of weeks.

Drop a note to info@tizra.com to schedule an appointment.

Kindle's Cool, but Remember the Web?

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 04:07:00 +0000

If anyone can obsolete the printed book, Amazon can, and they're clearly taking a formidable whack at it with their handheld Kindle reader.

We can't help wondering, though, how many consumers will really pay $400 for a single-purpose reading device, when alternatives from a riotously competitive hardware market combine reading with phone, messaging, music and other capabilities.

For example, the iPhone pictured here, with a tasty looking page delivered via Tizra's Agile PDF. We wish we could say it's the result of some special technology we came up with for delivering books to mobile devices, but really it's just a byproduct of the fact that Agile PDF makes books work like the web. So as the web finds its way into more mobile devices, so will books published with Agile PDF. Meanwhile, of course, there are already a billion or so eager readers accessing the web through more traditional means.

By the way, the sesame crusted tuna's from Montreal's Aix Cuisine du Terroir, one of hundreds of restaurants reviewed by the eat.shop guides, which you'll be hearing more about soon.

Keeping Local Talent Local

noreply@blogger.com (Abe Dane) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 16:14:00 +0000

Rhode Island's small, but it's got talent. I'd put the community of designers and software engineers surrounding Brown and RISD up against any I've worked with in New York or Boston. Yet technology startups haven't flourished here as you might expect, and much of Rhode Island's talent gets lured to the brighter lights of bigger cities.

Yesterday, we got more evidence that the state is working to correct that when the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation approved our application for a $100,000 Innovation Tax Credit. The credit will provide one more reason for investors to bet their capital on Tizra, and will mean Tizra can put more of those great engineers and designers to work close to home.

New Providence Business Nexus

noreply@blogger.com (David G. Durand) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 12:48:00 +0000

There's a new business development and networking site starting up for Rhode Island, the RI Nexus. I think they are still in soft launch mode to get the last bugs out, but if you follow the link you can get a peek now! It's a project of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, who are working with Jack Templin of Providence Geeks fame to make it all happen. Of course we're happy that our recent news is timed with their preparations for launch, as they've written some nice things about Tizra.

Rhode Island's size is often perceived as something that gets in the way of new businesses, but it is also be a real advantage in keeping companies and people well connected. The RI Nexus is a new, more formalized way to facilitate and capitalize on this, which is a good thing. Right now it might help us a little, but I'm sure it will help the state as it continues to develop. Way to go EDC!

Context is King!

noreply@blogger.com (David G. Durand) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:33:00 +0000

John Blossom's post on traditional portal strategies resonated with my recent thinking about aggregation sites (Shorelines: portals Passe). I made his post into a silly slogan for my subject line, but he is making a good case that even in the "piling things up" business, there are potential problems with actually piling them up.

Reading it, for a minute, I had a pang about Tizra. You might be able to read it as saying that it's not worth building your own content collection at all, but I don't think that is the practical point for publishers. I think that the notion of stressing context and tuning product offerings to user groups is exactly what we enable with our product and content management tools. You need to have a branded presentation of your content to all your different audiences, and make every audience an offer that they want to buy. That takes a lot of flexibility, which is what we've concentrated on. That flexibility should be on tap, not the endpoint of a 6-figure software development project, and control should be with publisher, not the vendor, so that you can make lots of offers and keep software development out of the picture.

Any branding, content organization, or product definition change that you have to rely on someone else to make is a potential lost opportunity, especially in a world where context is king.

... Of course this doesn't mean you shouldn't hire a designer, just that all of your communication loops should be as short and non-technical as possible.

Duke University Press signs an agreement with Tizra

noreply@blogger.com (Anne Orens) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 18:00:00 +0000

A brief moment for a minor bit of boosterism. Duke University Press has come on board with Tizra as a charter customer, something we’re excited about for a couple of reasons.

We're seeing how the emergence of long tail sales strategies is beginning to transform book publishers’ business models. The Duke books program, with its combination of long-lived scholarly and trade content, is particularly well-suited to a long tail sales strategy.

We are also really delighted at the prospect of working with such a smart and forward-looking publisher.

Aggregations are dead! Long live the one true aggregation

noreply@blogger.com (David G. Durand) — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 01:49:00 +0000

This is a bit of a hormone-supplemented blog post, but I hope the length is worth it.

We spend a lot of time pitching to potential investors. You need faith in your idea, and an ego of steel, because they're usually critical. I find it helps to think about all the great companies that barely got funded, were rejected by everyone, etc. That's nice for confidence, but you also need to think hard about every objection; they've dealt with a lot more business plans (certainly than I have, probably than you have, too).

So once I've cheered myself up, I try to follow up on my "they just don't get it" boosterism and look to see if it's me that just doesn't get it.

This note is inspired by some criticism that I don't believe, even after thinking about it. One prospect didn't like Tizra's business model of helping publishers sell their own stuff; he prefers to create or license large aggregations of data. "Aggregations mean real value and real exits."

Now, I can't say that building good content silos isn't still a viable business model, because it is. Aggregations gain real value from being a primary destination and search starting point, if they offer a uniquely valuable searchable collection. And that used to be terribly important. I can't count the number of times I talked about the need for a "critical mass of content" in the 90s, especially when consulting on custom web site projects for publishers with puny or unbalanced content collections that they intended to turn into magnet portals. But if you want to be a destination site you have to have an amazing quantity of stuff (for a value of amazing that keeps growing over time).

The web is already an aggregation with a critical mass of information about almost anything, and the search is in the hands of Google and the other search vendors.

To be a big destination site, you still need a critical mass that makes your site the best place to start some kind of specialized search. But why do you need to be a destination site? The search engines are the biggest destination sites and everyone uses them.

Even the big journal aggregators were able to double traffic to their publishers once they could they let Google index full-text content. That means if you can get an item (that people want) in Google, it'll get the traffic that you would have gotten from building a critical mass of items and investing a decade on advertising, library deals, and hard work.

That doesn't mean that grouping and packaging content isn't useful, but it means that everyone with unique, valuable content is already on the starting line if they just start running. The editors at good publishers already create valuable content silos, but driving repeat visits is secondary to getting customers in as cost-effectively as possible.

If you're a publisher, let the search engines concentrate on piling stuff up. Concentrate on finding the best content and getting it indexed widely. If you try to build an exclusive aggregation, either the search sites will mirror your content while you get going, or you'll have to lock them out and lose your easiest single source of customers and prospects.

Instead, concentrate on converting searchers to customers once they find your stuff, with rates, packages and special offers to entice every kind of visitor. Within your site, play the research and aggregation game by organizing your content for browsing and search so that customers can find more things that they want once they are there. Make sure your brand is prominent, so they associate you with the value of your content.

Such a site may eventually become a destination, but it doesn't need to be. The most important thing is to get stuff online, as quickly as possible, and make sure that there are ways to buy. Linking, keywording and organizing the content remain important, but just getting indexed is worth 8 years of aggregating and selling.

So, yes, in this case, the potential investor is missing an opportunity. Tizra's our infrastructure play -- integrated content management and access control -- is a great way to take advantage of a shift in how people are using the net.

It's pretty rare that I actually believe in large-scale shifts -- they're exciting to speculate about, but usually don't pan out in actual effect.

My academic brain thinks that this can't be a one-time shift, I think there may be a large-scale cycle in play here, but I'll talk about that in another post.

Adobe's epub format and reader

noreply@blogger.com (David G. Durand) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 13:14:00 +0000

The Adobe announcements last week were very interesting, but not for the reasons most people seem to think.

Here's the real story: The most important producer of print publishing tools is backing an XML-based format for electronic delivery, by making it a (relatively) painless option after preparing something for print. This means the new electronic format can come out the kind of editorial process publishers are already using. With all the limitations that this XML format has, it's much more in reach of publishers who can't afford to change all their editorial processes in a single go.

There's been a lot of concentration on the idea that a standard format will speed ebook reader adoption. This is something that vendors like Sony are realizing is important. Is this their first open format use in electronic media?. And indeed for the long-term future, I think that this is an important issue for vendors. For publishers and businesses right now, though, the focus on new reading platforms is insignificant outside of niche markets.

The Web is the platform that matters, especially for non-fiction content. At Tizra we've concentrated on PDF as the format that most publishers have in quantity, and on making it as close to a first-class web citizen as possible: that means we don't re-implement features (like bookmarks and emailing links) that web browsers already have, but instead we create a site where those features work as usual. That also means delivering pages as embedded content in HTML (with file download as an option, where it makes sense).

With our deep XML experience, we are going to be looking closely at how to take what is still designed as a monolithic file format for delivery and "Warehousing", and really get web marketing and product oomph out of it. Disaggregating .epub files will be as important as it is for PDF, but the results will be a little more precise and considerably more flexible.

And when we do it, PDF backfile or primary content will be delivered and managed the same way as .epub documents are managed.

The importance of XML is real, but practicality of PDF gets short shrift

noreply@blogger.com (David G. Durand) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:11:00 +0000

Publisher's weekly seems to have missed a key part of my message during Rebecca's and my backlist tutorial, which is that the long-term term payoff of XML is sufficiently expensive and disruptive that it can't happen quickly for publishers with significantly smaller resources than Thomson's, and that image based solutions like PDF can meet a lot of needs very quickly, for publishers that don't want to postpone full entry into online markets another 2-5 years.

The Adobe announcements (especially integration of new e-book formats into print-oriented production tools) seems to present a more practical way for smaller publishers to change their workflows than the "big-bang" conversion project. But that kind of incremental strategy leaves existing PDF and image backlists just the way they are, and means that PDF will be a key part of all solutions for online marketing and product definition for the foreseeable future.

Sometimes the future's so bright that it can blind you the present, or tomorrow.

I'll have more to say about Adobe's news, but I can say that I don't think the reader is the interesting part, even if it is a very Flash-ey demo

Pure Coolness

noreply@blogger.com (David G. Durand) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:20:00 +0000

I have seen far from all the talks here, but from what I've seen and the buzz that I've heard the winner of the "coolest presentation award" was Manolis Kelaidis. He showed a paper e-book device that he's been prototyping. By means of conductive ink traces, a person touching a button on the page can trigger an action by an embedded processor. He had a book where pads on the page triggered actions on his laptop: going to web pages, playing songs on iTunes, and so forth.

It was a hand-bound Bluetooth book!

There's clearly a huge expense still involved in platform building and so on, but everything he did is compatible with contemporary printing technology, using inks that are commercially available (not experimental). Other developments in printable circuitry play into this as well: printable batteries, printable electronic components, printable speakers.

Of course this is a technology, not a solution, and there's a huge chain of associated requirements -- protocols for books to notify other devices; security regimes to define so that your new books won't hack your computer. Based on experience in other media, conventions for authoring and use of the new technology are likely to be the most dificult adaptation.

But the great thing about paper is that you can write on it!

I immediately started thinking that this would be a great addition to a notebook. I'd buy a book with 10 generic buttons to a page, and any of them could be mapped to a function on my machine easily. So I could take notes on something I was recording as audio or video and whack a button on the page to make a link. Or to record the page that I'm browsing right at this moment. 100 pages is 1,000 special buttons to memorize some data!

The other interesting thing is that you can make conductive traces by using a silver ink marking pen, so you could just draw buttons onto a page anywhere you want, connecting them to traces on the edge.

If the notebook shell had a slot for a memory and the processor, and a unique ID build in, you might be able to bring the hardware costs way down because you'd just have to clip the brain onto the book, and the brain would know what book it was connected to, so you could have fewer chunks of electronics.

Links to follow soon

Start of two waves?

noreply@blogger.com (David G. Durand) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:10:00 +0000

The first wave is a wave of posts. I've arrived at the TOC conference, and gave my tutorial yesterday. I expect that the conference will give me ideas for several blog posts over the course of the conference. I've also got some stored up ideas that came from preparing the tutorial that should come out in a while...

I have hope that the second wave will be a wave of action. I was gratified to hear that Digitizing Your Backfile was the tutorial with the highest registration. I'm sure there's selection bias at a conference like this, but it said to me that perhaps people are getting ready to act on projects. I hope that the good tutorial attendance means people are ready to act, not just test the waters. The water is great, and it's time to swim!

I do have the sense that after a pause for a deep preparatory breath, online publishing is now heating up rapidly, and this time it's heading for action, not just interest. As people act, I'd like to be sure that they act carefully, and think about all the options (including ours, of course).

I sometimes worry that our no-development self-managed model is confusingly different to people who have been conditioned by years in which expensive custom builds were the only way to get stuff online without being bundled into someone else's aggregated product.