Abe Dane is chief operating officer of Tizra, a Providence-based startup company that has created software to turn PDFs into adaptable Web sites. Dane, a former print journalist, and his colleagues will present Tizra at tonight’s Providence Geeks dinner, which will be held from 5:30 to 9 p.m. at AS220, 115 Empire St. in Providence. (Cans of food will also be collected at tonight’s dinner to benefit the Rhode Island Food Community Bank.) He talked with PBN recently about Tizra and the future of e-publishing.

PBN: How does Tizra’s software work?

DANE: Like a lot of popular Web applications, Tizra Publisher adds value to information by enabling users to get it out to new audiences and markets in new and very targeted ways. Our current version is focused on documents, particularly long documents like books, white papers, manuals, training materials and the like, which we provide an easy way to distribute, manage and sell online with great flexibility, control and precision.

Users start by signing up for a free account at www.tizra.com. In less than a minute, they have a customizable site hosted on our servers. They then use a Web control panel to upload documents as standard PDF files (which can be created from most word processing and similar software) and from there they have a wide range of options. They can break the documents up into chapters or other subsections, reorganize them into different groupings targeted at different sets of users and markets, manage access based on a wide range of rules, and if they want, promote and sell them. They can even place ads alongside the content to generate additional revenue.

The software is available at subscription levels ranging from an ad-supported free plan, which lets users use all the core capabilities in a fully functional form, to an enterprise plan which allows for unlimited content and complete control over branding and all page layouts.

PBN: What makes Tizra’s software different from other e-publishing platforms?

DANE: Tizra Publisher is a truly industrial-strength publishing platform with the features, stability and security required by customers like MIT Press, yet it was designed from the very beginning to be easy to use, so it’s accessible to all kinds of organizations and individuals whether or not they have in-house IT staff. And unlike traditional custom software it doesn’t require up front investment, either in developers or in hosting and network infrastructure.

While there are a number of services available to publish documents without building or managing your own infrastructure, all of them place hard limits on the user’s ability control the presentation, organization and access terms for their online products. With Tizra Publisher, control is direct and immediate. No need to pass instructions through a consultant and hope nothing is lost in translation. And Tizra Publisher sites can be set up so they look like a seamless extension of the user’s online brand, rather than part of a service that belongs to somebody else.

The net result is that our customers get all the benefits of outsourcing their Web infrastructure, but in many ways have greater control over their online strategy than if they built the software themselves.

PBN: Tizra has signed a number of major deals with academic publishers. Do you expect that to be your main client base or do you see similar potential in other sectors?

DANE: Academic publishers have been a great proving ground for our product and will always be important to us. They have authoritative and valuable content, and users are accustomed to paying for it, so they have very well developed and demanding requirements for systems like ours, which has taught us a lot.

But as has been the case with many technologies, including the Internet itself, we’re seeing that the bigger business opportunities lie beyond the academic world where we got our start. In one way or another, almost every organization is a publisher - they have a huge amount invested in the internal and external documents they create, but the difficulty of distributing the right parts of them to the right people (and not to the wrong people!) when they’re needed means a lot of the value is wasted. Noted knowledge management analyst Bill Ives recently wrote that Tizra’s capabilities would be especially useful for research-oriented organizations like pharmaceutical companies and law firms, as well as organizations who want to distribute technical and marketing content to customers while still controlling access and presentation.

PBN: Is Tizra feeling any impact from the recession, particularly as a two-year-old startup? Do you have a strategy to deal with it?

DANE: We’ve been very lucky in that our product and overall approach is well-adapted to lean times. Our customers and prospects are feeling the pinch of needing to do less with print and more and more online, because it’s efficient, environmentally friendly, and increasingly what their users want, but they don’t have the capital to invest in expensive software licenses, IT projects and infrastructure. Tizra Publisher has always been positioned as a solution to exactly this dilemma.

Also, we run very lean as a company. We are quite happy to spare the expense of an office by working out of the CEO’s house, and take full advantage of the many services and tools that now make it possible to run a startup with much lower overhead than in the past. This means that, while investment is certainly tougher to get these days, we can make it go a long way.

PBN: What trends do you expect to see in e-publishing over the next few years?

DANE: The one, big overarching trend that’s always in the background is that all kinds of information are moving inexorably online. This is every bit as true of the kinds of documents we work with as it is of music and video through services like iTunes and YouTube. This is driven by the simple fact that more and more this is how users want to consume information. Librarians and university faculty frequently say that as far as today’s students are concerned, information that isn’t online doesn’t exist!

As is often the case in times of rapid change, the trends that get the most attention aren’t always the ones that are most important. For example, almost everyone is aware of Amazon’s Kindle. It’s a great device, and along with other handheld readers, is doing a lot to convince people that, yes, books can and will be read in digital form. But the truth is that handhelds still represent a miniscule fraction of the online market even for book content. The vast majority still read on PCs over the Web, and Web-enabled handhelds like the iPhone (which our application works quite nicely with) are achieving much faster penetration than dedicated book-readers. We do believe that handhelds will open an important market over time, but we’re not waiting on that to happen! •