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As I recall, there were arguments at the time saying that it would be good if Amazon did nothing with it. People wanted Amazon to leave the product alone and no

• threecheese 3y ago
  Better API support, better moderation, evolution of product features instead of their deprecation, maybe some stack improvements to what I think is an ancient php codebase. Amazon has removed some features in the last year - with little notice - that cause a lot of us to rush and download data before it was killed off. As a side gripe, the “download” they offered was completely useless on its own, and some folks (like me) had to write code to augment it with more site data - which wasn’t available in an API (see above) and had to be scraped. Almost intentionally bad, a json file filled with internal IDs and URLs that anyone with more than a handful of books would be screwed. The feature I relied on was the ability to mark certain books as “owned”, with the specific edition and cover in my personal library. As an example, I have a 2nd printing of The Two Towers with this beautiful cover art, and I could use goodreads as my online virtual library for friends/etc. In good news though, a number of other products are starting to fill that feature gap, but because they simply don’t have the massive amount of title, edition, and cover data (which was community-sourced), it’ll be a very long time before those products will have parity with Goodreads circa 2015.