Tizra Publisher is an online sales and distribution platform for electronic books and other document-based content.  The MIT Press CISnet (seen below) site is one of the sites built on this platform. Recently, I spoke with two of the co-founders, David Durand their CEO, and Anne Orens, the CMO.  Tizra is delivered on a SaaS basis that is a departure from most web site development tools.  David said he was involved in the development of many custom web sites for content distributors such as Oxford University Press. He saw many of the problems associated with outsourced custom and customer web site development and wanted to provide an easy to use solution.

Tizra enables publishers to bypass the content conversion, software development and maintenance costs traditionally associated with custom publishing websites. At the same time, it provides publishers with precise control over online product definition, sales terms, merchandising and marketing.  This control can be exercised directly by non-technical people using web control panels. This allows for more experimentation as marketing and editorial staff can test product and marketing ideas and respond to market feedback quickly without IT developer support.

The MIT Press CISnet is an addition to their regular web site. It is based on a paid subscription model. CISnet is designed for researchers who want to search and find specific content and may not want to read an entire book. As a former academic, this makes a lot of sense to me. You can search topics and go directly to a specific page of a book with the search term highlighted. You can then read the book page and explore other parts of the book. You can also copy and paste the page to a desktop application such as MS Word.  This is a great feature for the writer who wants to site a specific text. Since you can only do a page at a time, it is not practical for the person who wants to pirate the book.

Tizra is now rolling out a new tiered pricing plan that is oriented to a self-service approach, with self-service sign-ups.  The new product pricing ranges from free sites where they place ads, to fully customizable sites with no ads and complete commerce and branding control.  David took me to the administration interface to demonstrate the site creation and management process. Tizra makes it easy to sell online books and documents by the title, chapter or the page, or to collect, remix and sell pages in any combination.  You can implement a variety of sales terms, including pay per view, subscription access, multipacks, special discounts based on user group or discount code, and institutional access based on IP or login with variable concurrencies.  The branding is very flexible as you can see by comparing the MIT Press CISnet page above with the eat.shop page below.

The eat.shop site provides shopping and dining guidance in multiple cities.  Their site describes them as “noted for their clean and modern design, luscious photography, witty travelogues and perfect throw in your bag size and they feature only locally owned businesses that are in the urban core. Most importantly, you don’t have to worry about slogging through a zillion listings – just 90 carefully chosen gems are featured by the author who does all of the research, writing and photography.” The Tizra based site shows them off very well.  There is a Boston book that I should look into. Below is a sample of the Tizra administration system.

This is the MIT CISnet branded system but the Tizra administration system has same interface for all users. It allows you to set up title author, keywords, tags (invisible keywords like pub codes) that will facilitate search.  You can also have different types of key words such a geographical or topical. You can organize the site into collections and implement access control at this level. The collections are defined by query terms. You can easily reorganize the site into new collections. In addition, Tizra allows you to control content discoverability, selectively enabling Google and other search engines to index content behind the paywall. Below you can see the details associated with an individual book.

You can also organize the site by offers with invitations to buy and associated business rules. The ease of use allows marketing people to experiment with different promotions without an IT person. The branding options start with templates for quick development, progresses to allowing for custom style sheets, and to full custom development for high-end subscribers. This is a drag and drop feature. Once you create a set of pages you like, you save them as a master block for reuse.

I see this service as a great tool for content sellers. It can also be a useful content distribution system for enterprises that need to mange the presentation of their information.  This will be especially useful for verticals with a lot of internal content such as legal firms, pharma, and other research oriented enterprises. The access control features will be helpful here. It can also be useful for firms who want to distribute marketing and technical content to customers and prospects but need to customize its organization or exert control over access. There is also a Tzira blog for more details on what they are doing.