AAUP announces agreement with Tizra - press release

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

Press release
Contact: Anne Orens, anne.orens@tizra.com, 617-721-05662

AAUP Forms Ebook Partnership with Tizra

September 25, 2008 (New York, NY)

The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) is pleased 
to announce a new cooperative venture with Tizra, Inc., an 
e-publishing service provider. Through this agreement, AAUP 
members will be eligible for discounted access to the Tizra 
Publisher platform.

The Tizra Publisher platform is a highly flexible, web-based 
application for distributing and selling electronic books and 
similar content. Publishers signing up for the service will get 
their own customized ebook websites, and retain complete control 
over the presentation, organization and sales terms of their 
content through an easy-to-use web control panel. MIT Press 
recently launched an ebook site providing an example of the 
capabilities at http://cisnet.mit.edu.

"It is part of AAUP's strategic mission to help our members move 
more of their content online, where university press authors and 
readers are increasingly looking to find them," says AAUP 
Executive Director Peter Givler. "The Tizra Publisher platform 
has been garnering interest from our membership, and we're very 
excited to be offering this program to make the service 
accessible to a wide range of presses," added Brenna McLaughlin, 
AAUP Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director.  "Tizra's 
service is affordable for small presses, and scales to handle 
large content collections and extensive customization, meeting 
the range of needs of our AAUP membership."

The AAUP-Tizra discount program is particularly well-suited to 
presses with staff who are taking on more responsibilities as 
they balance print and electronic format publishing. "AAUP 
presses are exactly the kinds of organizations we designed Tizra 
Publisher to help," said Tizra CEO David Durand.  "They have 
great content and great marketing ideas but often lack the 
technical resources we provide to build a successful ebook 
program."

The non-exclusive agreement between AAUP and Tizra provides 
discounted subscription rates at all product tiers to AAUP 
members, modest revenue back to the association, and the 
opportunity for presses of any size to move into the electronic 
sale and delivery of content collections with very little 
technology expertise needed.

AAUP will begin arranging webinars with Tizra for interested 
members in the first week of October. Tizra will be inviting 
participating presses to sign up for the first, free tier of 
their hosted platform's service, and will be ready to answer any 
questions AAUP members have about the service or the new discount 
program.

About AAUP

The Association of American University Presses is an organization 
of more than 130 nonprofit scholarly publishers, dedicated to the 
support of creative and effective scholarly communications. 
Through its programs and information resources, AAUP helps its 
members fulfill their common commitments to scholarship, the 
academy, and society. Learn more at www.aaupnet.org.

About Tizra

Tizra's mission is to provide content owners large and small with 
unprecedented control over the marketing, sales and delivery of 
their online content.  Tizra's first product, Tizra Publisher, is 
a hosted service that enables non-technical staff to create new 
online products from existing content and sell them through 
publisher branded web sites with highly flexible business terms. 
The company is headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, and 
funded in part by Rhode Island's Slater Technology Fund.  More at 
http://tizra.com.