The Jellybooks presentation at If Book Then Stockholm on Thursday 21st March 2013.

Also available for download at: jbks.co/1425opY

updated on Saturday 23rd April 2013 (corrected notes)

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How does one avoid Amazon, the 800 pound gorilla, that dominates the ebook and

digital publishing industry?

Well, Jellybooks was founded on the principle of avoiding Amazon and creating

alternative approaches for ebook discovery, ebook marketing and ebooks selling.

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Where is Amazon weak?

1) Most people go to Amazon to buy books that they already discovered elsewhere.

They discover these through recommendations from friends, reviews, online tips,

after browsing a book shop or similar. Amazon is the destination for cheap book, but

it is not a good online substitute for browsing a physical book store or library just for

fun.

2) Amazon encodes all books, even samples with its proprietary DRM. This makes it

tricky to share such samples with friend.

3) Amazon does not share its data, even publisher’s sales data is delayed and not very

granular, yet some of the most interesting opportunities arise from mining such data.

4) Reaching an audience on Amazon is mostly guesswork. There have been schemes to

game the system, such as making ebook free to climb the popularity charts, but

Amazon keeps changing its algorithms without warning and its rules are opaque.

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At Jellybooks we focus on discovery and have developed our business model around it.

Our goal is to delight users with new book discoveries. In the process we aim to create

systems that allow publishers to promote books through targeted promotions without

alienating the consumers. Such promotions should be perceived as relevant and

appealing by the reader and the intelligent use of data makes this possible.

In tackling the problem, we have assumed that there is not one, but many different

forms of discovery and we focus on 5 in particular: serendipitous, social, distributed,

data-driven and incentivised discovery.

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Project Cranberry by Jellybooks was launched in March 2012 - almost exactly 1 year ago

- with a focus on serendipitous discovery.

Project Cranberry is an ongoing attempt by Jellybooks to recreate a fun and entertaining

discovery experience online.

Its goal is to entertain the avid reader for 2-5 minutes during a break and help them

discover some new book and provide samples (first 10%) for later reading.

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To make it fun and easy we focused entirely on book covers without any text or other

elements to distract the user.

The navigation elements were kept to an absolute minimum with 1+4 icons in the top

navigation bar.

The website is responsive, which means the layout and number of covers automatically

adjusts to the user’s screen size on smartphone, tablet, laptop or PC.

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If a cover grabs the user’s attention, they can click on it to get 4 options:

• Sample the book for later (offline) reading on an ereader, smartphone or tablet.

• Share the sample with other online via Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook or email (more

than ½ the reader use email).

• Sign up to be notified when there is a special ½ price deal (bingo – we just identified

a price-sensitive customer)

• Or buy the book now and we link your though to you local Amazon, iTunes or online

book shop (ebook or physical).

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In Summer of 2012, we followed up with Project Blueberry to support social discovery.

With this release we created a set of social media tools and optimized them for reader

engagement. They are designed to maximize the number of users who download or

share a sample after seeing it featured on a social network.

Our solution is based on fine-tuning HTML mark-up specific to each network so that we

can display cover, title, author and synopsis alongside the link.

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One such example are Twitter Cards, where cover, author and synoposis are displayed in

expanded tweets or when a user replies to a tweet.

This effect is based on the use of Twitter Cards.

Similar tools exist for other social networks, but the rules differ form one network to the

next and our sharing/download links have a set of optimized mark-up for each social

network, so that auhtors, piblicist and others don’t have to worry about this.

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Project Cherry is currently in beta and will launch at the London Bok Fair.

It allows author, agents, publishers, reviewer or bloggers to use the Jellybooks sample

system to place buttons and widgets on their own homepage, blog or website, so

readers can discover books in context and download an ebook sample for later reading.

All buttons and widgets make use of the same social mark-up system as normal jbks.co

sample links.

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The user does not need to visit the jellybooks.com website, but can download an ebook

sample directly from the author’s, publisher’s or blogger’s website for later reading.

All samples are DRM-free, can be freely shared and are supported by “Send to Kindle”

(.mobi files), “Send to Readmill” (ePuB files) and the Jellybooks “access and download

form anywhere” cloud infrastructure.

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Now to the most interesting part of today’s presentation, which is Project Elderberry.

Project Elderberry is a cross-platform effort to collect, store, distribute and analyse data

of how readers recommend and share books online.

It is being supported by the UK’ Technology Strategy Board and is currently under

development.

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We still tend to think tend of books in the traditional form such as hardback, paperback,

mass-market paperback or now ebook, but in so doing we still think of books as

“packages”.

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However, increasingly a book is just a URL for the product page on Amazon, be it a link to

an information page about the book, a link to a sample file we can download (i.e. jbks.co

link) or a link to re-download an ebook we have previously purchased (for example on

iTunes).

In other words books are increasingly represented by an online URL and not the

“container” or digital file.

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URLs can reveal many things, such as what people share (as in the book links they

include in their emails, tweets, Facebook posts, etc., when, where, on which device, etc.

(most of which can be found in the meta-data of posts on social networks).

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However, it can be quite messy and developers with the rights skills in visualization,

machine learning and data mining are not necessarily well versed in the specialised

language and practices of digital publishing.

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Therefore, Jellybooks creates a clean and structured data set.

We retrieve, index, cache, organize and clean up the data, so that others can make easy

use of it.

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We provide this cleaned-up data through an open API to 3rd parties, so they don’t have

to worry about data integrity and can focus on creating algorithms for visualizing and

analysing the data.

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At Jellybooks, we also do our own data-mining and we use the collected data to

understand readers and what they read.

One of our goals is to develop better discovery and recommendation algorithms for

books.

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At Jellybooks, we also use data to understand who influences whom and how this is

subject, category or genre specific.

Our goal is to find the right audience for each book (finding books for reader, and

readers for books are related, but not identical challenges!)

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Our goal is to understand online influence networks for books so that these can be

targeted for promoting books without disrupting the natural flow of communication.

Our aim is to target promotions, give-aways or special deals without them being

perceived as intrusive or as spam.

Publishing is extremely diverse, so targeting is crucial to an effective online discovery and

marketing strategy.

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The Jellybooks API is free, as we wish to encourage innovation and make the Jellybooks

ecosystem, including the Jellyfactory, more attractive to publishers, developers, authors

and readers.

We make money, by charging a small commission on special deals (part of our

incentivised discovery system, that we cannot cover in more detail here due to time

constraints) and promotions where we help publishers reach a new audience.

We also take a cut on each 3rd party app that uses our API and is sold through our app

market. This can be a small inexpensive visualization apps, or more sophisticated and

pricey analytics tools.

We also receive a small affiliate commission from buy links we refer to 3rd party retailers,

but this is a very small and insignificant part of our business model.

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So here is one of the approaches combing data-driven and incentivised discovery

through which Jellybooks generates revenue.

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Special Deal invites are sent out in the morning in time for breakfast.

These are targeted based ona reader’s past online behaviour.

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Recipients can download a sample for the featured sample and read it on their commute

to work.

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With 1 click, they join the deal (first-time users need to enter credit card details), but

their credit card is not yet charged.

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Users are encouraged to share the deal, because the deal will only be successful, if a

minimum number of readers participates.

There is 50% discount available, but only for buying as a group.

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Users can monitor how sign-ups are progressing.

When the 100% treshold is reached, the deal goes live and credit cards are charged.

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New suers can still join “last chance to lock-in savings”), but their credit cards are

charged immediately.

There is no upper limit on participants, just a lower limit, which is title specific and set by

the publisher.

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Ebooks are sent to the participants once a deal is live and their creditc ard has been

charged.

Deals generally close before 6 p.m. which allows users to continue reading the book

where they left off in the morning.

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What is the minimum number for deal partcipants is not reached?

Share more next time! The discount is the reward for sharing and promoting the deal!

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And here is the quick “elevator” summary of what Jellybooks is all about.

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Thanks for listening!

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