Duke U Press Chooses Tizra Agile PDF

["Anne Orens" <aorens@gmail.com>]

This may be of interest to the members of liblicense.

Duke University Press Chooses Tizra Agile PDF to Expand their 
eBook Offerings

*Branded publishing model offers an alternative to iTunes-style 
aggregations

*September 6, 2007 (Providence, RI) - Tizra, Inc. announced that 
Duke University Press has signed an agreement with Tizra to use 
Agile PDF, a hosted publication sales and delivery service, to 
repackage, deliver and sell their book-based content in an easy 
to read electronic form.

The white-labeled Tizra platform will allow Duke to create and 
manage a fully searchable, Duke-branded online storefront to sell 
their books to individuals and institutions. Buyers will be able 
to purchase individual chapters or pages, as well as collections 
combining multiple works under a variety of licensing and pricing 
models.

Duke University Press publishes approximately 120 books annually, 
placing it among the 20 largest university presses in America. 
Its journal program is in the top 5, with more than 30 titles.

"Our readers are a diverse audience of scholars and educated 
readers," stated Stephen Cohn, Director of Duke University Press. 
"We expect that Tizra's innovative system will over time allow 
many new readers to discover our content, as well as allow us to 
deliver new mix-and-match capabilities to those who already view 
our publications as crucial for research, teaching, and 
intellectual stimulation."

Driven by a web-based control panel, the storefront is easy to 
use and designed to be controlled by non-technical publishing 
staff.  With direct control over visual design, content, and 
sales terms, the Agile PDF web service enables rapid exploratory 
development and testing of products and pricing, differentiating 
it from sites like Google and Amazon, whose product organization 
and presentation are not under the control of the publisher.

According to David Durand, CEO of Tizra, "Duke University Press 
holds a leadership position among university presses in applying 
technology to scholarly communication.  We are delighted have 
them as a charter customer, and to have the opportunity to help 
them deliver content with such enduring value. Agile PDF 
simplifies the management of a branded publication site just the 
way blogging software simplified personal homepages, delivering 
PDF content that was originally developed for print to readers 
with the ease and familiarity of a custom-designed HTML website.

"We think that Tizra's on-demand platform offers advantages to 
publishers who want a partner to help them get online without 
being subsumed into a single iTunes-style marketplace that limits 
control of product definition and branding."

About Duke University Press

Duke University Press is the publishing arm of Duke University. 
It publishes cutting-edge academic work, primarily in the 
humanities and interpretive social sciences--including both books 
intended entirely for academic audiences and books appealing to 
broad audiences. For more information, please visit 
www.dukeupress.edu.

About Tizra, Inc.

Tizra's mission is to help businesses to flexibly package, 
deliver, and sell information online.  Tizra's hosted solution 
enables publishers to generate immediate revenue and gain 
experience in the critical expansion of online information sales 
beyond periodicals and databases and into longer forms of 
content.  As the internet continues to transform information 
delivery, Tizra enables customers to control their website, 
product and terms of sale, and lets them focus on tuning their 
products and strengthening customer relationships rather than 
worrying about their technical infrastructure.  The company is 
headquartered in Providence, RI. For more information about 
Tizra, please visit www.tizra.com

####