Projo Biz Blog

A Providence technology startup has landed a contract to produce online books for MIT Press, the companies announced jointly today.

For Tizra, formed in March 2006, MIT Press is the fifth customer to sign on since it unveiled its Agile PDF product at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishers conference in New York in February. That raises its customer base to nine — four companies came onboard before the official unveiling and have helped Tizra work out the kinks.

Agile PDF allows publishers to sell their books in an online store without having to maintain the infrastructure of the store themselves. Electronic copies of the books are sent to Tizra’s servers, which host the Web sites for the online stores. But publishers can use Agile PDF to customize how that store looks, so customers never realize they “left” the publishers Web site and hopped on Tizra’s servers.

“The publishers are in complete and direct control,” said Abe Dane, Tizra’s chief operating officer. Dane was one of the company’s four founders, who remain its only employees. “All of our customers host their content on our servers, but it looks to the customer like it belongs to the publisher.”

That allows publishers to maintain their brand, rather than provide “anonymous commodity content” to online booksellers such as Amazon and Google, Dane said.

Gita D. Manaktala, marketing director of MIT Press, said her company went with Tizra because it allows the press to concentrate on its core business while establishing an online presence. “We want to stay a publisher, and we really don’t want to be a technology company.”

But Tizra was not the only company MIT Press, which publishes 200 titles a year, explored.

“We’ve actually talked to a lot of other vendors,” Manaktala said. “The thing that was different about Tizra is, because they were small, we knew we would have their attention.”

But Tizra’s software’s features also won MIT over. “There’s a lot of flexibility there,” said Manaktala, adding that will allow the press to experiment and find the best way to market its books to online buyers.

The founders and their family and friends have invested more than $300,000 in the company, which was boosted by a $500,000 investment by the Slater Technology Fund. The fund is a state-supported non-profit that looks to nurture technology startups in Rhode Island. Tizra also has been helped by tax credits arranged through the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation and networking with the Providence Geeks, a gathering of information technology and digital media entrepreneurs that meets at AS220.

The company’s name comes from a vegetable tannin derived from a Moroccan sumac plant that is used to tan Moroccan leather used in bookbinding.

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