Digital Book World hosted an interesting webcast today, called Finding Books Without Borders: Discoverability in a Digital and Social World. Two fairly new companies, Jellybooks and Readmill, talked about how they tackle the issue in their own ways.
Jellybooks
Andrew Rhomberg, the founder of Jellybooks, talked about the four ways that his company helps solve the discovery problem.
Book Covers
Covers are worth more than 1,000 words, and on Jellybooks, book cover images help to make discovery more fun.
Social Discovery
Social discovery is another way of saying word-of-mouth, but Jellybooks focuses on the word of mouth that happens on social networks. For example, it takes advantage of Facebook’s open graph to show more metadata on books. Jellybooks also uses Pinterest strategically, where every pin for every book has a title, cover, synopsis, and sample button to encourage users to click on the sample link and download part of the book.
Distributed Discovery
People learn about books through a variety of methods, whether its mentioned in a footnote of a paper, a newspaper article, or through some cultural connectivity. To help readers become more aware of a book, Jellybooks uses special widgets. Authors, bloggers, and publishing partners can embed the widget on their webpage, and it will work like a Facebook “like” box, except instead of liking a book, you can download a sample of the book.
