A New Hope, A New Beginning
Dear Reader,
Many thanks for supporting Jellybooks over the past five years of our journey.
In March 2012, we started a service to help readers discover books. We experimented with new online approaches to presenting books and explored the challenges of book discoverability.
We learnt a lot doing this, but some of our ideas and aspirations did not quite work out. One of the things that happened along the way is that we started a little side project called “Reader Analytics”.
Reader analytics is about understanding how people actually read books. Do readers finish the books they start? How long does it take to read a book given all the distraction of daily life? How does cover art influence our reading behaviour and what are the factors that make us recommend a book to friends or family or remain silent about our reading adventure? You can find out a bit more in this article that the New York Times wrote about Jellybooks:
This project has come to dominate everything Jellybooks does and it is now our sole focus. As a result, we have decided with a heavy heart to end our discovery platform and the “legacy” service will end on 31st August.
On 1st July, we will stop updating the catalogue and on 31st August access to content on the discovery homepage and your “My Books” area will cease. (Ebooks distributed under the reader analytics programme will be unaffected.)
This is not the end of Jellybooks, though. Instead we continue to focus all our resources on growing and expanding our reader analytics platform. We have the great fortune of working with many great publishers such as Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks, Ullstein, Droemer Knaur, Bastei Luebbe, MIT Press, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Wharton Digital Press and many others. In partnership with these publishers we have already run dozens of campaigns, spanning hundreds of titles, and provided ebooks for free to thousands of readers.
It’s free to join — you can use your existing sign-on credentials to participate in our reader analytics programme, but to get notifications about free ebooks you need to join our mailing list.
We hope you will join us on this new journey and we thank you deeply for all your support over the past couple of years.
Greetings from London
Team Jellybooks
(Andrew, Andy & Jeff)