Livres Canada Books, the Ottawa-based organization that supports Canadian book exports, has partnered with U.K. technology provider Jellybooks to make Canadian titles easier for overseas readers to discover and sample before buying.
Under the agreement, books from more than 100 independent Canadian publishers will be enrolled in Jellybooks' Discovery platform, which offers a "look inside, click and read" tool used by bookshops, retailers, and publishers to let readers preview and sample titles online. Livres Canada Books is positioning the initiative as a way for Canadian books to reach readers "across the globe."
Indeed, these excerpts will appear across Jellybooks' international bookseller network, which includes Waterstones, Blackwell's, Foyles, and Awesome Books in the U.K.; Eason, Dubray Books, Hodges Figgis, and O'Mahony's in Ireland; AdLibris in Sweden and ARK Bokhandel in Norway; Wook in Portugal; Exclusive Books in South Africa; Bookswagon in India; and a number of independent bookshops throughout the U.K., Ireland, and Europe.
The samples will also appear on the Livres Canada Books website, in the 2026 Rights Canada catalogue, and in the 2027 Canadian Studies Collection.
Kieron Smith, e-commerce director at Waterstones Booksellers, said that online samples now play the role that browsing a book's back cover and opening pages once did in a physical shop.
These samples, Smith said, "increase sales as people are more confident that the book they're buying meets their needs but also reduces book returns for the same reasons."
Smith added that reader habits have shifted over the past 15 years toward more open-ended online browsing rather than purely search-driven shopping, making sample-driven discovery more valuable to booksellers now than in the early days of e-commerce.
Additional partners supporting the project include eBound, the digital asset distributor owned by the Association of Canadian Publishers; DeMarque, a Québec-founded international digital asset distributor; and Readerbound, which builds custom websites for book publishers.
Andrew Rhomberg, CEO of Jellybooks, noted that book sales of English-language titles continue to rise across Europe, especially in Scandinavia, where "between 10% and 25% of all physical books sold, online and in physical stores, are English-language titles. He noted that Jellybooks recently launched its service with online bookseller Buscalibre in Latin America, proving that reading English around the world is "a larger and, so far, pretty relentless trend."
