Well, that was a big project. We just launched a completely new version of the eBooks.com website. The new site is built on all-modern technology, from the ground up.
- Better for mobile devices
- More personalised experience for all users
- Easier and faster for us to add features
- Simple for publishers to plug in to eBooks.com
- Almost infinitely adaptable and scaleable
If you visit eBooks.com on a desktop computer today, you won’t see a lot of difference. This was deliberate. To minimise any temptation to try and do everything at once, the brief was simple: just re-build the site, in modern technologies, before we let loose on a list of 1,001 new features.
But the user experience for people on a phone or tablet is strikingly new. Until now, our mobile site was somewhat basic, with only a fraction of the features and functions found on the desktop site. Now if you’re on a mobile device you can do absolutely everything.
46% of our visitors are on a mobile device
Over the years, as the business of selling ebooks became more complex (territorial copyright, agency pricing rules, changing file formats, DRM requirements, multiple currencies, smart phones and tablets …) our website, of necessity, grew into a kind of Byzantine octopus. But now it’s a butterfly, a ballerina.
This single, elegant website, built on .NET Core technology, is 100% responsive, meaning:
- the same website serves desktops, phones and tablets,
- the same website delivers local recommendations wherever you are in the world
With this new platform we’ll provide a much more personalised service to our customers, taking account of their searching, browsing and shopping experience to offer titles that they’re actually interested in.
We have a growing suite of tools and services for book publishers, and the new eBooks.com lends itself to easily creating APIs (plug-in tools for publishers) and white label services.
The system is very modular, and a breeze to deploy — now, when we push a new build live no-one has to cross their fingers.
This re-launch is the next step in our strategic plan to provide a sublime user experience for our customers.
