A Providence technology start-up has landed a contract to produce online books for MIT Press, the companies announced jointly yesterday.

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

The Agile PDF system allows publishers to sell their books in online stores without having to maintain the infrastructure of the stores 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 the system to customize how each store looks, so customers never realize they “left” the publishers’ Web sites 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 MIT 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 that 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 her company to experiment and find the best way to market its books to online buyers.

MIT Press has a one-year agreement with Tizra, which is typical, according to Anne Orens, Tizra’s marketing head.

She said the company is not looking for long-term agreements with customers. “That’s our big plan to have a good-enough service that people won’t want to leave.”

Tizra makes its money by charging a flat fee, plus taking a percentage of the sales through the online stores. The flat fee is on a sliding scale, based on how much Tizra collects in the percentage of sales. “You can think of us as partners with these publishers,” Dane said.

So far, the company hasn’t really made money, reporting “negligible” revenue last year, according to Dane. “Until this year, we’ve been a pre-revenue start-up.”

The founders and their families and friends have invested more than $300,000 in the company, which was boosted by a $500,000 investment from the Slater Technology Fund, which is a state-supported nonprofit that looks to nurture technology start-ups 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 group of information-technology and digital-media entrepreneurs that meets at AS220.

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

pparker@projo.com