About us

Jellybooks is a boot-strapped start-up with passion.

We started Jellybooks to provide a new approach to exploring, sampling, sharing and buying books.

This section gives you a brief glimpse about us and what we do.

You can find out more by following us on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Tumblr or Angelist.

The sweet rebels (our team)

Andrew Rhomberg, founder, product manager and spokesperson for Jellybooks. He also has the unenviable task of negotiating with publishers worldwide, which requires the patience of a saint, which he ain’t.

Andy Roberts, master of the Jellyfactory and puts Willy Wonka to shame. At the Jellyfactory, he supervises the receipt of ebook master files from publishers, from which samples are generated before the Jellybooks candy wrapper is applied. Covers and tasty ebook samples are then distributed from the Jellyfactory to readers, ideally in milliseconds.

Jeff Abrahamson, co-founder and ex-Googler, Jeff is not only the oldest member of team, but also our resident machine-learning expert. He dreams up new ways for book recommendations, segmenting audiences and targeting books at readers. He spoils us with his cooking talents.

Baldur Bjarnason, coder behind the Jellybooks “Reader Analytics” software (“Projects Crowberry, Honeyberry and Pomegranate”). All round ePub guru, too. Normally works for Unbound from whom we regularly borrow him for some of the coolest projects in digital publishing. Notorious for his weird ring tones, which we are told are Icelandic folk songs.

Ivan Shutovitch, our email guru. He developed the responsive email design for Jellybooks (“Project Blueberry”) .

Gary Aston, our HTML and CSS wizard. He makes the Jellybooks web app look splendid and slaps Andrew on the fingers when he doesn’t sketch the simplest and most intuitive user experience possible. He is not to be confused with an Oompa Loompa. He makes much more splendid candy.

Ismael Celis, Bambino No. 1 and our Javascript ninja. Most of Jellybooks was written in Ruby on Rails and he is the ninja who wrote most of the code pretty much bug-free. 100 days and no downtime. Way to go!

Niall Mullally, Bambino No. 2 and our Ruby-slippered rock star. If Ismael didn’t write the Ruby on Rails or Javascript code, then Niall probably did. His next task is coding our shopping baskets with check-out in multiple currencies. Ahoy!

Gwyn Morfey, Bambino No. 3 and our project manager. I have been assured he eats more food than just New Bamboo. He makes sure that our code doesn’t turn into spaghetti while keeping us agile and lean.

Jamie Brooker, designer. Like the look of Jellybooks? Think those buttons and icons are adorable? They were all handcrafted by Jamie, the human part of We Are Human.

Johan Brand, the more apish part of the We Are Human duo. Slaps Andrew’s other hand (the one Gary hasn’t slapped) when Andrew makes a brand or aesthetic faux pas.

We encourage personality at Jellybooks, which is why we love flying Air New Zealand, another company where personality is allowed, except we don’t get many opportunities to fly to the land of Middle Earth, at least not yet.

The sweet rebel nationalities: Australian, Austrian, Chilean, British, Danish, French, Irish and Norwegian.

The philosophy of Jellybooks

Jellybooks looks and feels different to other book sites, doesn’t it?

That is deliberate. We broke with many conventions of our industry to find a better way for discovering new books to read and for how to buy them.

There is no “search” button on the Jellybooks home page because if you already know the title of the book or the author, then you already know what you want. You are not discovering, you are searching and Google and Amazon do a great job at this.

We have created a cover-centric interface, because it is beautiful and simple and helps you discover great books. We do judge a book by its cover, but it is also simpler and faster to explore a large number of books by just scrolling the covers. Any form of text or numbers below the covers would put an extra burden on our brains and inhibit serendipity. In many ways, we have taken our inspiration from how we would stroll around a physical book shop exploring the shelves for your next read.

We want to break the tyranny of the best-seller list. Digital has given us near infinite choice. It is now easier than ever before to find and order any book ever written. At the same time, this flood of writing is making it harder and harder to discover the hidden pearls. Fabulous books are being condemned to a life of obscurity because they don’t make it onto the best-seller list.

Jellybooks wants to correct this. What you see now is just the beginning. We are working on tools to make discovery and sharing easier, to channel the best of social conversations. We use machines to manage the abundance and bring order to an unruly mess. We never forget that machines are designed to help people and make life easier. We believe in simplicity and human ingenuity and that computers should only augment these.

Our story to date

• December 2010 Idea for Jellybooks born at a meeting between Andrew and Random House UK
• January 2011 Jellybooks incorporated. An extended period of product design, meetings with publishers, paper-based user testing and research follows.
• November 2011 Jellybooks featured in Bookmachine and Publishing Perspectives.
• December 2011 Andy, Gary and the 3 Bambinos join the team.
• January 2012 Jamie and Johan join the team. Coding started.
• 21st March 2012 First release – Cranberry
• April 2012 First major update – Cranberry XL
• June 2012 Second major update – Cranberry XXL
• September 2012 Our second major release – Strawberry

Or visit our Facebook timeline for more stories, pictures and comments.

Our plans & roadmap

This is just the beginning of a hopefully sweet journey ahead.

We have a lot more sweet stuff in preparation. Tons of new jelly stuff!

Next up is the introduction of Strawberry XL, a new browsing experience that lets you create custom category tabs so you can view titles only in the genres and categories of your choosing. It’s just like having a section in your favourite book store stocked with books from your favourite genres, authors or publishers.

Just around the corner is our “Cherry” release, so PRO users can put our “sample” and “share” buttons on their own homepage, blog or website for readers to sample and share the books they are discussing or reviewing. How do you become a PRO user? You need to be invited. Any existing PRO users can invite you. Any publisher or imprint featured on Jellybooks has a bundle of invites to hand out.

We are also preparing an option for micro-publishers (those with fewer than 50 titles) and author-owned publishing companies to submit their books to the Jellyfactory through a self-service page. Combined with a PRO invite, this enables authors to use the Jellybooks cloud platform to promote their own books and facilitate sharing through social media. You can sign up for an invite at vip.jellybooks.com

Our “buy” page will also undergo major changes to make it even easier and faster to buy books. We will also include options for you to buy direct from the author or publisher where this is possible.

Last, but not least, we are busy developing the infrastructure for our signature feature, the sweet deals. This will hopefully start rolling out in late summer or early autumn.

Contacting us

Please email us at info(at)jellybooks(dot)com, if you have questions about features or need help with the service.

If you are a self-published author or a micro-publisher with less than 50 titles and want to be included in the Jellybooks platform, then we suggest signing up for our upcoming “Cherry” service at vip.jellybooks.com This will give you an opportunity to directly upload your ebooks to the Jellyfactory.

If you are a publisher with more than 50 titles and want Jellybooks users to explore, sample and share your titles, then get in contact with us via Linkedin or Twitter and we will get in contact through email or phone. For obvious reasons we are not able to publish our contact details.