there is a story behind every book

What is Jellybooks?

Jellybooks is a web app for exploring, sampling and sharing books. It was designed to help you discover your next book to read and to share your book discoveries with friends.

To discover new music we have Pandora and Last.fm. Why can’t have we something similar for books? Team Jellybooks is trying to change this. Join us for the ride!

Guide to Jellybooks

The first thing you will notice about jellybooks.com is that we show only covers - glorious, large, high-resolution covers. There are no prices, commentary or other distractions.

The second thing you will notice is that our books are displayed on an infinite scroll, a kind of digital scroll for ebooks. Keep scrolling downwards and more and more book covers will appear. There is literally no end (unless you reach the very limits of our library).

Our web pages are also responsive. What does that mean? The number of covers automatically adjusts to the size of your browser window or the size of your gadget’s screen. We keep the size of the covers constant while changing how many covers we show to fit the size of your gadget’s screen. This is called responsive web design. Go try it out on different devices. You will make our designer @gazaston very, very happy if you do. He spent a lot of effort creating this for your bookish pleasure.

See a book that interests you? Just click or tap on the cover and more information will appear. Once again, we have tried to keep things really simple and we will show only the essentials:

  • title
  • author
  • synopsis (summary) of the book.

This is our Reinheitsgebot (a German law stipulating that beer may be brewed from only 3 ingredients: water, malt and hops).

You will also see 3 buttons:

  • A green “sample” button for adding a sample of the book to your personal cloud library for later downloading to other gadgets
  • A blue “share” button for sending a link to bookish friends via email or sharing your discovery with the world (or at least your followers) via Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest who can download their own from the Jellybooks cloud using the link you sent them . Are you an influencer? Do people pay attention to your book recommendations?
  • A yellow “deal” button to get alerts when there is a sweet deal on offer for the book. There is probably no deal tomorrow, but there might be one in the not too distant future.

You can sample and share books without having to register on the Jellybooks site, but you may miss out on a few free features. You definitely have to register if you want to use the “deal” button, because we would not know how to contact you otherwise when there is a deal. There is of course no obligation whatsoever to participate in a deal. You will simply get an alert with the option to participate when a deal is on.

It is really all very simple. Enjoy and discover some great reads and don’t forget to share what you discover with friends!

Membership

Jellybooks is an open web service. You can sample and share books without having to register (= you stay anonymous), but there are a few benefits that only registered members can enjoy:

  • A personal cloud library called “My Books”
  • One-click (instead of two-click) downloading of book samples
  • Cloud-based access to your personal book samples from any device
  • Customized book recommendations
  • “Send to Kindle” service
  • (and soon) sweet deals.

Membership is free and we promise to keep it free.

Once you register, we create a personal cloud library for you called “My Books”. This cloud library holds your personal book samples and your preferences and is the foundation for many other Jellybooks services.

Your cloud library is personal and unique to you. You will need to sign in to Jellybooks to access your library, though by default we will try to remember you through a little piece of software on your computer, called a cookie. Important! You can opt out of cookies when registering.

You may register either via email + password or using Twitter, Facebook and Google. Whatever option you choose becomes your future path for signing in when returning. You can choose one or multiple options when signing up. We do encourage you to register using more than one method, especially if you use Twitter, Facebook or Gmail log-in frequently and can’t easily remember how you registered. Registering with multiple services also makes it easier for you to use some of our advanced sharing services. However, if you are comfortable only with email + password, then that’s OK, too, simply use what you are familiar and comfortable with.

Once registered, we will also keep a record of the books you have sampled and interacted with. The purpose is to create better book recommendations for you. We will share none of this data with anybody else and the collection is all done by mindless machines. Nobody gets to see your personal data. We might send you book recommendations based on your sampling and sharing behaviour, but we will never sell your data to 3rd parties. See our privacy policy for full details.

Upon registration you will also be automatically enrolled into Club Jellybooks, a digital book club which entitles you to participate in our sweet deals. No worries, there are no membership fees and no commitments of any kind. You can join to participate in a sweet deal whenever you like and leave a deal at any time prior to closing.

Books in the Cloud

“Cloud” is the description for an online storage space that is personal and unique to you and that you can access from any device that has browser support and Internet access.

At Jellybooks, we use the cloud for offering you a personal online library for downloading your ebooks to any device and to interact with them remotely. We create this cloud library for you automatically once you register with Jellybooks. Access to your cloud library is through the “My Books” icon. This icon becomes active as soon as you log in.

Every time you sample a book, a copy of the preview is placed into your personal cloud library. You can download these samples from your cloud library at any time from any internet-connected device. To delete a sample, click on the title you want to remove and tap the “delete sample” icon in the shape of a cloud with and an “x” that appears in the upper right hand corner of the book detail page.

There is no limit on how often you can download a book sample. You might wish to download a sample to your iPad today, to your PC tomorrow, your Android smartphone next week and your laptop at work next month. There is no need to move files around or to use USB dongles. All very jelly, isn’t it?

You can also share samples with others straight from your cloud library. Simply tap on the book you want to share, click on the blue “share” button and choose the method of sharing. A link will be sent to your friends with a message for them to download a copy for themselves. Your friends do not need to register with Jellybooks or create their own cloud library, but they are of course welcome to do so.

Your Jellybooks cloud has no upper limit. You can store as many samples as you like and we will create the online storage space necessary. How sweet is that?

Sharing and copyright

At Jellybooks, we believe that sharing is the key to discovering great books and many authors and publishers share this belief with us.

Almost every ebook you sample or share on Jellybooks is subject to copyright law, but with the support of authors and publishers, we have created a system for you to legally sample and share the first 10% of any ebook featured on Jellyboooks via the cloud (there are a few exceptions where the sample might contain a little bit less than 10%, but you may of course still share it).

Over the past couple of months and years, Jellybooks has obtained permission from authors or their agents and publishers — through written agreements — to make previews of their ebooks available for readers to sample and share. Authors do wish you to sample their writing and to recommend their books to friends. They understand that a recommendation with a sample included is more powerful than one without.

No digital rights management (DRM) software has been added to these sample files. Nevertheless, the samples are still under copyright and you may not copy the files, upload them to file sharing sites, adapt the ebook or any part of the ebook, or pass the writing off as your own. Any of these actions would be a violation of copyright. You may only download and share each sample in its entirety via the Jellybooks cloud links and for the purpose of you and your friends to sample the author’s work. Please see our Terms of Service for the full details.

Participating publishers

At jellybooks.com you will find books from over 100 publishers and an even larger number of imprints. Our publishing partners include:

For the full list see jellybooks.com/discover/publishers

The titles include many Man Booker prize winners, such as:

We are continuously adding new authors and publishers, so please do check back from time to time for updates or follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr for news alerts about publishers and authors who have joined Jellybooks.

Are you a publisher with a catalogue of more than 100 titles and would like to make these available for discovery through Jellybooks? Reach out to us through LinkedIn! We have our own Jellybooks page, and we will get in contact with you about how to interface with our Jellyfactory.

Have you published or written fewer than 100 titles? A new Do-It-Yourself service for interfacing with the Jellyfactory is now live. For more details see our VIP section.

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Your feedback

We apologize that we are unable to currently offer you a means of contacting us by phone, but you can email us at info(at)jellybooks(dot)com or chat with us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. Our handle/profile name is “Jellybooks”.