Project Cranberry

Recreating the Serendipity of Browsing a Bookshop to discover what to read next.

The Jellybooks web app launched on 21st March 2012 was part of an experiment in online book discovery by Jellybooks called “Project Cranberry”.

What were our motivations for Project Cranberry?

First of all we wanted to explore alternatives to Amazon and how readers discover books to read. Few of our friends and colleagues visit amazon.com to discover books. Rather Amazon is a destination for buying books, not discovering them. Thus we thought there was room to experiment with different ways and different designs for discovering what to read next.

Above all, our passion at Jellybooks www.facebook.com/jellybooks is to help readers discover great new books beyond the best seller list.

Celebrating Serendipity

We thought some of the greatest book discoveries are those where we stumble over, the books we weren’t looking for. In other words serendipity plays a large part in discovering the true reading gems.

Focus on Book Samples

One of our goals was to have DRM-free book samples that readers could download to any device, not just Kindle readers and that they could freely share these ebook samples with others. Our hope was that readers might spend a few minutes of spare time while waiting for a meeting to start or a train to arrive, browse www.jellybooks.com to discover some new books and download free ebooks samples of their discoveries these for later reading. In other words discovering a book and reading a book would happen at different times and in different contexts.

Glorious Book Covers

We also decided to think differently about how to use book covers. The conventional wisdom at the time held that ebooks had made the book cover, obsolete. Digital files needed no cover. We thought otherwise. We designed a digital interface that focused exclusively on book covers and with no text of any kind. We displayed book covers in all their high resolution glory are displayed them cover out, just like in a book store display.

The thinking was, and still is, that the human brain can easily and quickly browse a large collection of images in search of something interesting. On the other hand, the human brain struggles, if it has to switch between looking at images and reading text. Different parts of the brain are involved in this activity and the experience can quickly become tiresome, especially when a computer or smartphone display is involved. Therefore, when you are in browsing mode, www.jellybooks.com displays only book covers and nothing else. More information is revealed once you click on a cover that has captured your attention.

Simplicity

We also thought that the Jellybooks web app needed to be dead simple and in designing www.jellybooks.com we designed an experience with as few bells and whistles and possible and with positively no advertising.

We kept the navigation menu extremely simple and made it icon based with just 4 icons (plus a few extra icons, if you are a PRO or VIP user.

Responsive Design

Project Cranberry was one of the first efforts to bring responsive web design to digital publishing, so no matter whether you browse jellybooks.com on a small smartphone screen or an extra-wide PC screen you get the same great experience. We achieved this by arranging book covers in columns and the number of columns adjusts automatically based on the screen size. We also employed a feature called infinite scrolling, so you could scroll and scroll without having to click from one page to the next, to the next, to the next. This makes it very natural to use jellybooks.com with a touch interface on iPhone or iPad.

Price Doesn’t Matter

We chose not to display the price for any book titles. Why? Well, because we thought that readers don’t choose one book over another based on price. Yes, readers will look for the cheapest source once they have decided on a book, but during the discovery process, price (mostly) doesn’t matter and in any case you might not wish to buy the book until you have completed the sample, try before you buy.

The Future

We have learnt a lot from our little experiment and there will be a number of changes in the near future as we add more features and functionality. Above all, we are proud that we have grown the Jellybooks catalogue of available titles 20 fold since our initial launch. You can find a list of all the participating publishers at: jellybooks.com/discover/publishers