Jellybooks, the London-based platform founded by Andrew Rhomberg in 2011, has evolved from a book discovery and analytics tool to a more sales-focused service targeting readers directly through extensive partnerships with booksellers and publishers. The digital software specialist has expanded its partnerships with retailers across multiple markets, and is increasingly focused on encouraging reading among young audiences. Rhomberg spoke with PW about how Jellybooks has repositioned itself following the pandemic and the future of the company’s strategic direction.

Tells us a bit about Jellybooks’s mission, partners, and investors.

We provide “book candy” to readers and software and “data candy” to publishers. Publishers who work with us know that we love bringing fruit-flavored jellies to meetings. At the heart of all our services is the Jellybooks Cloud Reader, a browser-based e-pub reading system that also supports listening to audiobooks. We work with hundreds of publishers, bookshops, and retailers from small indie publishers with a handful of staff members to the likes of Penguin Random House, Grupo Planeta, and Springer Nature.

The Jellybooks Cloud Reader is a “click and read” experience. There is no app to install and no file to download. The e-book reading or audiobook listening experience happens entirely within the browser, and the book can be accessed from any connected device with web browser suppor,t be it a smartwatch, smartphone, tablet, laptop, PC, or internet kiosk or a giant digital display screen. A big focus for us at Jellybooks is accessibility, and providing a great reading or listening experience to blind readers, partially sighted readers, dyslexic readers, color blind readers and any reader with special needs.

Do you see Jellybooks as an alternative to Amazon's Look Inside and Book2Look?

One of our services, Discovery, was developed in partnership with Blackwell’s as a direct substitute for Amazon's Look Inside service. Kieron Smith, digital director at Blackwell’s, used to work for the Book Depository, then part of Amazon, and wanted a look-inside experience that matched the best Amazon had to offer. From those early beginnings we expanded to a wide range of bookshops in the U.K. and Ireland and have been adding retailers in other countries too. Blackwell's has since been taken over by the Waterstones group, and we are working on integrating our service across all its members, including Foyles, Hatchard's, Hodges Figgis, and Wordery.

We have a close collaboration with Batchline, a division of the Bookseller Association of the UK and Ireland, to support high street and indie bookshops as well. We launched a WordPress for Woocommerce plug-in last year that allows indie bookshops to integrate look-inside functionality in under 15 minutes with a minimum of software experience.

In its functionality, the service is comparable to Book2Look, though we have a different philosophy when it comes to user experience, accessibility, and ease of integration. Whereas Book2Look is resold by Bowker in the U.S. and Nielsen in the U.K., we prefer to work with publishers directly. Staying close to the customer and understanding their unique needs and requirements is of great importance to us.

You were also offering A/B testing and reader response programs, among other functions, and providing discounts, early reader copies, and other perks. Can you share a bit about which of these programs have been most successful and why?

Many will know us for our reader analytics service Radar, which was prominently featured in the New York Times. I still laugh at the Grey Lady calling us "Moneyball for Book Publishing." Those were the days! For more than 10 years we assessed books prior to launch with online focus groups of 300-1,000 readers and measured what percentage of readers would finish the book, how fast it took them to finish reading, if they liked the books, if they would recommend it, and more.

We discontinued the Radar reader analytics service at the end of last year. The reason was that developing these insights would take between four and eight weeks. You cannot command test readers to drop everything and read your book—reading needs to be natural, if the results are to be meaningful, and that takes time. The length of time it took to develop the insights was unfortunately too slow in many situations, given the tight schedules for most marketing campaigns, which limited the number of titles the tool could be applied to.

However, reader analytics lives on in our new Reading Pass service, where we focus on what books young readers finish, how their reading age compares to their biological age, and how we can increase the number of hours they spend reading each week and month through target recommendations that are guided by our reader analytics data.

Is this strictly for e-books? Do you work with audio as well?

Most of our work is e-books, but we also support audiobooks as an integral function of the Jellybooks Cloud Reader. AI-assisted audio narration is increasingly blurring the distinction between e-books and audiobooks. A lot of growth is in audiobooks, but it is our opinion that e-books, audiobooks, and podcasts form a continuum when it comes to consuming narrative or longform content, and that we must look at the three formats as a single ecosystem.

You have developed various promotional programs over the past 15 years—which of these are currently running and most relevant in 2025?

We are moving increasingly towards being a profit center for publishers rather than a cost center. This means we are working more and more with the sales teams at publishers rather than the marketing and publicity teams. With our Page Cast, Book Pass, and Reading Pass services, we are now a retailer or vendor of e-books and audiobooks. We try to fill gaps in the market not well addressed by the big reading system, whether that is Amazon, Overdrive, Bolinda, or BorrowBox.

Any plans on developing a D2C site, or is the focus on retailers?

When it comes to our Discovery service offering cloud-hosted samples, our focus is entirely on retailers. However, sometimes the publisher sells direct to consumers and uses our samples for that purpose. When it comes to engaging young readers, we are indeed moving into being a direct to consumers channel, but we are also working with schools and other educational institutions. Our focus is on reading for pleasure and literacy development, not textbooks. Our upcoming Page Cast service is designed to make it really easy to display books on interactive whiteboards and large interactive digital screens.

How have you incorporated or rejected AI in your work developing Jellybooks?

AI is already a firm fixture of the publishing ecosystem. When it comes to samples, we have systems and processes in place to block or discourage the inclusion of content in training models without the publisher's permission. In other areas we collaborate closely with partners on AI-facilitated audio narration. In many situations, the distinction between e-book and audiobook is disappearing, with users switching between reading and listening depending on circumstances or doing both at the same time.

In-house, we are mostly focused on traditional machine learning applications, be it in creating age-appropriate book recommendations for young readers to how to determine where to open a book sample. A big focus for us is how to close the reading gap among young readers and raise the next generation of readers in a world that is overflowing with digital stimuli in the form of video, social networks, and interactive gaming experiences.