CHICAGO and PROVIDENCE – The Chicago Distribution Center, a division of the University of Chicago Press and one of the nation’s largest distributors of scholarly and professional books, has signed a deal with Tizra Inc. that will enable the center’s 62 clients to sell subscriptions to online books.
The joint venture will begin this summer, with a pilot program that will employ the services of the center’s Bibliovault, a digital repository for nonprofit publishers that contains more than 14,000 titles.
“Our customers have told us that they want to have their content delivered in a variety of ways,” Karen Barch, chief operating officer of the Chicago Distribution Center, said in a statement today. “Tizra’s elegant and easy-to-use solution gives our publishers a simple way to sell and deliver their book content online.”
The Providence-based company is the developer of AgilePublisher, a Web-based software platform that makes it easier to find, view and sell online versions of books and other documents including those stored as portable document format (PDF) files. Existing clients include MIT Press, one of the nation’s largest university presses. (READ MORE)
“The demand for access to scholarly content online is increasing both in the academic community and among the general public,” said Carol Kasper, marketing director of the center’s Books Division. “Bibliovault is a cooperative venture between members of the scholarly publishing community, and the University of Chicago Press is very pleased that it can be used to facilitate online access to Chicago content and that of our CDC client presses,” Kaspar added.
“We’re delighted to be in the first group of CDC publishers piloting the CDC/Tizra online service,” added Garrett Kiley, director of the University of Chicago Press. Their publications “appeal to wide audiences, from general readers to educators and scholars,” he said. “Our readers need to find us from wherever they are, with immediate access to the content they want. Tizra helps us meet that need.”
Tizra enables clients to create branded Web sites, while the CDC enables publishers to integrate sales reporting for online and print publications. The CDC-Tizra venture will combine those capabilities, pairing the distribution center’s data conversion, shopping cart, print fulfillment, e-commerce and reporting systems with Tizra’s Web publishing and data delivery capabilities, to “allow CDC publishers seamless online marketing and merchandising,” the organizations said in their joint release.
“Tizra’s goal is to provide a platform for the future of online publishing, and help publishers generate new, immediate revenue streams from existing content, without disrupting existing processes,” said Anne Orens, the company’s chief marketing officer. “Our partnership model keeps us focused on our publishers – whether that means giving them a complete stand-alone sales and delivery solution, or linking our platform to existing services. We’re delighted to work with a distribution center with CDC’s size and reputation, and through them, to serve their pre-eminent publishers.”
Tizra Inc. is a software-development startup whose investors include the quasi-public Slater Technology Fund. Its first product, AgilePublisher, is an online publishing and delivery service that makes it easier to sell and distribute data from PDFs. Additional information is available at www.tizra.com.
The Chicago Distribution Center – established by the University of Chicago in 1966, to warehouse titles for its university press – now serves 62 publishing houses in the United States and abroad, although the University of Chicago Press remains its parent and its largest client. Its 273,000-square-foot distribution and fulfillment center hosts a range of services, including a short-run digital print facility and the Bibliovault, a digital asset distributor (DAD) for nonprofit publishers. Additional information is available at www.ChicagoDistributionCenter.org .
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