10 ms·

Amazon Acquires Social Reading Site Goodreads

296 points by ssclafani 14y ago

diadara 14y ago
I hope they don't murder the site.
- calvin 14y ago
  Did Woot get murdered? No. Did Zappos get murdered? No. Did Quidsi get murdered? No. Did Shelfari get murdered? No. (Note: I'm biased.)
  - tjic 14y ago
    For that matter, a friend at http://www.kivasystems.com/ http://www.kivasystems.com/ says that Amazon is really pushing them (in a good way - scaling, improvements, etc.)
  - benatkin 14y ago
    Not a proper disclosure.
  - officemonkey 14y ago
    Woot got a little murdered. It ain't like it used to be.
    - akl 14y ago
      How so?
  - mikecane 14y ago
    Lexcycle got acquired and murdered.
sgpl 14y ago
Not surprised. Goodreads is for books what IMDB is for movies (which Amazon also owns). It'll nicely complement Amazon as a recommendation engine to push buyers to amazon to purchase books (which it already does). I use goodreads to track books that I want to read at some later point; and have used it to discover new books. Atleast I'm glad it was Amazon vs "Any Other Big Corp" because I believe that Amazon will keep the service alive vs shutting it down or trying to absorb it somehow.
- evanjacobs 14y ago
  This isn't a good analogy. IMDb was and is literally the best source of movie data anywhere. It is more useful to think of them as Wikipedia for movies since the community maintains the info and includes data that isn't available anywhere else. Goodreads is the largest community of book readers in the world and so they would be able to provide their tools for book groups and conversations about books that Amazon is sorely lacking.
  - 205guy 14y ago
    That isn't a good analysis. I have found wikipedia itself to be the best source of movie data. For all titles I've searched (and not always mainstream or US releases), wikipedia has a better summary, a better plot description, more release info, and a better page layout. Perhaps it doesn't list all the production details such as who was the key grip, but you can easily jump to all the major cast and producer/director wiki pages. It just seems more complete and easier to read. Imdb now seems too specialized, like it's for the movie industry itself.
    - nfg 14y ago
      That might be precisely what the OP meant by 'best'. To me the distinction they make seems important and not inconsistent with what you've said.
  - salvadors 14y ago
    Of course, Amazon's purchase of IMDB took place several years before Wikipedia even existed.
- bennesvig 14y ago
  I'd compare Goodreads to Foursquare. I mostly use it for my own purposes of tracking what I'm reading (similar to checking in at a restaurant) and occasionally see a recommendation from a friend I'm following (similar to restaurant tips/check ins).
gcheong 14y ago
The lack of integration with my kindle is a large part of why I don't use Goodreads as much as I might otherwise but I'm kind of disappointed that it will take a buyout to get that integration rather than Amazon creating an api that would allow third-parties to integrate their services with the device directly.
- quink 14y ago
  I'm just hoping the older Kindles with see Goodreads integration too and that it will not be for Amazon eBooks only - and perhaps a separate Goodreads app. I've been a member since March 2008 and with three Kindles it's a minor pain to hop on Goodreads with the built-in browser. It's exactly what the eInk Kindles need. Apart from a way to get eBooks from the built-in web browser.
- djhworld 14y ago
  According to the owner of the site, Kindle integration will be a top priority "2. Our members have been asking us to bring the Goodreads experience to an e-reader for a long time. Now we're looking forward to bringing Goodreads to the most popular e-reader in the world, Kindle, and further reinventing what reading can be." http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/413-exciting-news-about-goodreads-we-re-joining-the-amazon-family http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/413-exciting-news-about-g...
- jdroo 14y ago
  This kind of capability (exporting and integrating kindle data) already exist. Take a looks at http://amazd.com/ahmad/book http://amazd.com/ahmad/book for an example.
- nichodges 14y ago
  It's a shame that Amazon didn't invest in creating a Kindle API rather than buying an existing service. I built http://kindred.it http://kindred.it to load up my highlights via xpath because I was so frustrated with the kindle.amazon.com UI - it seems they could benefit much more from creating an API and letting great services be built rather than acquiring what will likely be Shelfari mkII.
traeblain 14y ago
So....Shelfari is going to die now? I guess the team there with Shelfari couldn't cut it with making a good Book data site.
- Narretz 14y ago
  I never knew this one! Looks simpler than Goodreads, I like it. But it has the same bias towards the English edition of a book, not even highlighting the original even if I searched for it. I wonder what's gonna happen to it.
- bherms 14y ago
  I hope not... I find shelfari to be a far superior site than Goodreads.
jamesshamenski 14y ago
I think this is Amazon's third purchase of a social book community.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
magicmarkker 14y ago
If I can link my amazon account and have it load all of my books into goodreads that's great. Otherwise, I still won't use goodreads because I have too many books to enter manually and I'm too lazy.
Narretz 14y ago
Hopefully they will invest in development of the actual site. Its ui is inconsistent, sometimes confusing, and at times very slow. While they support many many use cases, the workflow for a simple thing like "add a book I am reading and the start date" is needlessly convulted. I also don't like how they prioritize the English version in the results even if you search for another / the original language. Especially in the latter case, the original should be highlighted. And you can only mark the edition your read, not the language explicitly.
- LeeHunter 14y ago
  All that's true, but it's actually one of the reasons I love the site. It's got a funky, homemade feel that I find quite charming. Part of the reason that I'm comfortable contributing my reading information to the site (~500 books so far) is that I don't feel like it's being sucked into a corporate borg. This past year I've been trying to get away from Amazon by replacing the Kindle app on my phone with Moonreader, so I'm really sad to see Goodreads get assimilated.
  - caseydurfee 14y ago
    If funky and homemade is your thing, there's always librarything (which also has a real business model, so not likely to get swallowed up any time soon.)
    - movingahead 14y ago
      Apparently, Amazon holds a 40% stake in Abebooks which owns LibraryThing. From Pandodaily, "Amazon already owns Shelfari as well as Abebooks, which bought a 40-percent stake in LibraryThing in 2006, so it owns all or part of three of the top social-reading sites." http://pandodaily.com/2013/03/28/amazon-bought-goodreads-but-it-wont-break-it/ http://pandodaily.com/2013/03/28/amazon-bought-goodreads-but...
- salvadors 14y ago
  They actually don't prioritise the English version — they simply prioritise the version that the highest number of users have read/rated/reviewed. Sometimes this causes unexpected issues the other way round, such as with old English children's books by authors like Enid Blyton that these days are much more popular in Indonesia.
chris_mahan 14y ago
time for me to close my goodreads account I guess...
austenallred 14y ago
This acquisition makes so, so much sense. I have a goodreads account, but I never update it, mostly because it's too much time. If it were well-connected (or synced?) with my Kindle, I would use it literally weekly.
- jamie_ca 14y ago
  Agreed. I don't use a Kindle, but having a (optional, configurable) "Rate this book?" prompt when removing a book from my in-progress shelf would be very handy.
  - bmelton 14y ago
    It's even more frustrating than that, currently, because when you finish a Kindle book, it asks if you want to tweet about it or post it on Facebook. I don't, but I very much want to post my rating of it to Goodreads, and that isn't currently an option. This fixes a big hole that a lot of people (at least, a lot of people on Goodreads) have been clamoring for. Definitely an obviously good acquisition.
  - mcintyre1994 14y ago
    Considering Amazon already has a review section for each book it sells, this seems like it was already a missed opportunity. It's great they're probably not going to kill the service, but it seems like it'd have made sense to have more tightly integrated their own reviews a long time ago.
- krschultz 14y ago
  100%. I'm looking forward to auto-syncing my Goodread account to paper books I bought, e books on my Kindle, etc.
- radicaldreamer 14y ago
  My biggest complaint about Good Reads is it's confusing user interface. I would really use it a lot more if it was a little less clunky to use.
jacobheric 14y ago
I'm a sometimes Goodreads user. I'd use it more if it weren't maddeningly slow. One thing that I had noticed about Goodreads was that Amazon was always at the bottom of the online store referral list. Because of that, I took them to be Amazon hostile or adverse (perhaps reading too much into that). But, I went to the site today and now Amazon is at the top of the online store referral list.
dsyph3r 14y ago
I was never a big reader of books before I joined Goodreads. I spent a lot of time reading tech books (mostly programming related) but never fictional books. Since joining Goodreads and enjoying the social aspect Ive read so many more books. I really hope Amazon doesn't destroy this service
djhworld 14y ago
Personally I think Amazon have just purchased this site for the data. Goodreads has a fairly reasonable recommendations engine based on the book collections people have inputted into the site, so I'd imagine that information might be very interesting for Amazon to capitalise on.
- vikramls 14y ago
  Maybe there should be a system where the company doing the acquisition has to get permission from the acquired company's users before assimilating them... This however is not going to happen since data is so valuable.
- tomkarlo 14y ago
  I'm guessing Goodread's data set on book collections is maybe 1/1000th as large as Amazon's. They're more likely buying them for the community of heavy readers and the team.
  - salvadors 14y ago
    The collections on Goodreads are generally more comprehensive than those on Amazon. I've added over 750 books on Goodreads, but fewer than 10% of those were purchased through Amazon.
    - tomkarlo 14y ago
      You're talking about the actual user-generated lists. Amazon also has the data on what all of their users have actually bought over time. (Hundreds of millions vs Goodreads millions.) That's what they use to create purchase recommendations, because it's higher value data than manual user-generated collections.
      - salvadors 14y ago
        Yes — Amazon certainly has significantly more data, but Goodreads' data is deeper, because it's not restricted to items bought from Amazon. Goodreads has a much better picture of what I read than Amazon could ever get simply from my purchase history (even if they cross-match with bookdepository). Being able to mine the Goodreads data too should enable them to make even higher value recommendations. (Note: I'm not claiming this is why Amazon bought them!)
travisp 14y ago
I agree that it makes a ton of sense for both companies, but how they integrate it is going to be very important. My wife and I don't use a number of Kindle features (including the current built in review feature) in part because we share our Amazon account. But, I am a big GoodReads user. If Goodreads just gets attached on a per device basis (like Twitter), then it's no problem, but if it gets integrated with the Amazon account itself (as some people seem to be suggesting) then I don't see how we (and many others like us) could use it.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago
  Is there a reason you both use the same Amazon account? I'm interested because we see this problem crop up every now and then. Apple ID's are another place it's been problematic. With Apple I can understand sharing the ID so you can listen to each others music collection but what are the benefits of sharing an Amazon account? Prime?
  - malcolmmcc 14y ago
    I would assume the main reason is to share Kindle books.
    - k-mcgrady 14y ago
      Good point, should have thought of that. Possibly music and other media too. I always forget Amazon sells so much digital content.
  - matwood 14y ago
    BTW,prime is already shareable to multiple accounts in the same household.
  - pseut 14y ago
    My wife and I shared an Amazon account for a while (~10 years) because it was easier. If you live with someone and have joint finances, why bother with separate Amazon accounts?
patcon 14y ago
I'm not looking forward to this. The best community was just bought by the company that killed text-to-speech in their product in favour of making hundred of millions on audiobooks. Welcome to your new garden prison, online book community. Enjoy the complimentary bookmarks.
arjn 14y ago
How is this a good thing for readers and other book retailers ? Will we still be able see links to buy books from a number of different retailers such as B&N or Indigo ? I doubt it.
breck 14y ago
Awesome. I love Goodreads. I hope this helps them make it better.
- r00fus 14y ago
  What happened to other social reading sites like Shelfari that got acquired by Amazon? Amazon has a strong motive to prevent any alternate review service from gaining traction as those Amazon reviews drive sales.
austinstorm 14y ago
Nobody's talking about Shelfari, which hasn't changed since 2008 when Amazon acquired it. It got frozen in time.
- LoganCale 14y ago
  Not exactly true, I use it often and small features are being added to it semi-regularly.
xbryanx 14y ago
Now if Amazon will just buy LibraryThing and Discogs I can beam my obsessive library catalog consciousness up into the Amazon mothership.
- jonbischke 14y ago
  They are 40% of the way there with LibraryThing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibraryThing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibraryThing
jefftchan 14y ago
Besides Apple, I see Readmill [1] as another serious competitor. It provides the social integration on top of an ebook reader. However it's lacking in its catalog selection. [1] http://readmill.com http://readmill.com
myle 14y ago
A mail from a year ago (29/1/2012). We want to let you know about a change on our site that is impacting some of the books on your shelves. It's important that you read this and take action by Monday, January 30. For years, we've used Amazon's data for information such as the book title, author, and publication date. Unfortunately, the terms required by Amazon have now become so restrictive that we decided it makes better sense to work with other data sources. However, the deadline to make the transition is Amazon's, and they have told us that we must stop using their data by January 30. We have to meet this deadline. We've been adding data from other sources and now know which books still need help. You are receiving this email because we need new sources for 2 of the books on your shelves. First, please be assured that none of your reviews or ratings are in danger. Not a single review, comment, shelving, or rating will be lost in this transition. We have a system in place to preserve your reviews and comments for any books at risk until we can find new sources. That's the most important thing—your data is 100 percent safe. What can you do? The good news is you can rescue your books. Saving a book is easy. Just click the "Rescue Me!" button next to each book edition that needs help, and fill in the information on the following page. A few keystrokes can help preserve these books for millions of future readers. Rescue your books! It takes only a few clicks, and you will be doing your part to make sure these books remain available for other readers like you. We appreciate the passion you bring to Goodreads, and we apologize for the short notice. If we could have prevented this inconvenience in any way, we would have done it. Ultimately, this change will be better for the members of Goodreads and long-term success of the site. If you don't want to rescue your books, you can also export your books to a spreadsheet so you have a record of them. All the best, Otis & Elizabeth Goodreads Founders
- ivankirigin 14y ago
  It's weird, playing hardball with your platform for the purpose of forcing an acquisition. Do the BD & corp dev folks here think they are going to retain the founders for long, after this kind of behavior? Then again, Tony Hsieh is still at Zappos, right?
  - tomkarlo 14y ago
    It seems kind of paranoid to suggest that Amazon would manipulate an API that's so central to their business for the purpose of forcing an minor acquisition. Not to mention it would probably be cheaper to just buy the target for a few million dollars.
tocomment 14y ago
Probably a dumb question ... But how does this give superior recomendations to amazons normal recomendations?
- nollidge 14y ago
  It doesn't. The selling points are A) the social component (what are my friends reading?) and B) keeping track of books I want to read.
runn1ng 14y ago
Book Depository getting more popular than Amozon? boom, they buy them. GoodReads having better Google positions for books than Amazon? boom, they buy them. I am personally a little afraid of this monopolistic behaviour. But hey, capitalism, I guess...
- salvadors 14y ago
  A lot depends on what they do with the companies they acquire. Lots of people were afraid of what would happen to BookDepository post-sale, but pretty much none of that has happened. (I'm particularly grateful that free worldwide shipping didn't disappear!)
  - runn1ng 14y ago
    Their definition of "free" is fun though. Try some proxies and simulate visiting the site from different places .... yes, their prices vary based on from where you visit it, so they add the shipping to the basic prices.
    - salvadors 14y ago
      Prices sometimes also change depending on which site you're visiting. Generally these are just a few pennies, but I've seen differences of more than two or three pounds between the .com and .co.uk prices for the same book, even though theoretically they should be exactly the same.
ajju 14y ago
About time.
fakeer 14y ago
First Shelfari which Amazon bought 3 years ago and now Goodreads. In three years there's been no updates to Shelfari and that was my biggest peeve against Goodreads - lack of update) and absence of even a half decent mobile app(I use Android). So, looking at Shelfari's fate one can say that Amazon has bought it for anything but continuing the development and doing sth about it's questionable interface. Hope LibraryThing stays afloat. Would like to move my data there. Just in case.
pathikrit 14y ago
I used to be one of the engineers on shelfari. The team was kept mostly the same 4-5 guys from before acquisition and we worked on incremental stuff - integrating with Amazon sign-on, better meta data, lot's of minor UI things like better threads, series info etc etc.
drucken 14y ago
Maybe Amazon can turn Goodreads into an actual recommendation site and use the full capabilities of its databases and search facilities. To this day, since I first joined near its founding, I am astonished that there is still no way to search for the highest rated and voted books within a genre. Instead, one is left to rely on heavily skewed "Lists" or "popular" books or their (annual) Award system. In short, at this time, Goodreads for books is far less useful than say, IMDB is for movies. I actually find Goodreads less useful than Amazon itself for recommendations!
nzeeshan 14y ago
Goodreads and Amazon were two places I used to go to check out book reviews. Now I can get best of both in one place. Makes a lot of sense for Amazon to buy them.
- salvadors 14y ago
  Have they said that they're going to merge those?
oblique63 14y ago
I wonder if this will have an effect on Google's current scraping of goodreads reviews to fluff-up their books section on the Play store...
Groxx 14y ago
Makes a huge amount of sense for Amazon, but honestly I can only see this as a bad thing for Goodreads. Amazon has huge issues with reviews of the fulfilling company getting blended in with reviews of the actual product, and there's another layer added with media - quality of the content, completely separate from the build (pages falling out, horrible OCR, etc). Goodreads has reviews of content quality. Amazon will muddy that immensely with reviews of every other part of a sale if they do any integration into Amazon (unless they plan an overhaul of their reviewing architecture - I'd love it, but I doubt it).
- salvadors 14y ago
  I'm hopeful that if they integrate the reviews at all (and I'm not sure they will — I suspect there's a different plan here), it'll be solely in the Goodreads→Amazon direction. Amazon have a fairly good history of letting the companies they acquire stay fairly autonomous and independent.

296 points by ssclafani 14y ago

diadara 14y ago

I hope they don't murder the site.

calvin 14y ago
Did Woot get murdered? No. Did Zappos get murdered? No. Did Quidsi get murdered? No. Did Shelfari get murdered? No. (Note: I'm biased.)
- tjic 14y ago
  For that matter, a friend at http://www.kivasystems.com/ http://www.kivasystems.com/ says that Amazon is really pushing them (in a good way - scaling, improvements, etc.)
- benatkin 14y ago
  Not a proper disclosure.
- officemonkey 14y ago
  Woot got a little murdered. It ain't like it used to be.
  - akl 14y ago
    How so?
- mikecane 14y ago
  Lexcycle got acquired and murdered.

sgpl 14y ago

Not surprised. Goodreads is for books what IMDB is for movies (which Amazon also owns). It'll nicely complement Amazon as a recommendation engine to push buyers to amazon to purchase books (which it already does). I use goodreads to track books that I want to read at some later point; and have used it to discover new books. Atleast I'm glad it was Amazon vs "Any Other Big Corp" because I believe that Amazon will keep the service alive vs shutting it down or trying to absorb it somehow.

evanjacobs 14y ago
This isn't a good analogy. IMDb was and is literally the best source of movie data anywhere. It is more useful to think of them as Wikipedia for movies since the community maintains the info and includes data that isn't available anywhere else. Goodreads is the largest community of book readers in the world and so they would be able to provide their tools for book groups and conversations about books that Amazon is sorely lacking.
- 205guy 14y ago
  That isn't a good analysis. I have found wikipedia itself to be the best source of movie data. For all titles I've searched (and not always mainstream or US releases), wikipedia has a better summary, a better plot description, more release info, and a better page layout. Perhaps it doesn't list all the production details such as who was the key grip, but you can easily jump to all the major cast and producer/director wiki pages. It just seems more complete and easier to read. Imdb now seems too specialized, like it's for the movie industry itself.
  - nfg 14y ago
    That might be precisely what the OP meant by 'best'. To me the distinction they make seems important and not inconsistent with what you've said.
- salvadors 14y ago
  Of course, Amazon's purchase of IMDB took place several years before Wikipedia even existed.
bennesvig 14y ago
I'd compare Goodreads to Foursquare. I mostly use it for my own purposes of tracking what I'm reading (similar to checking in at a restaurant) and occasionally see a recommendation from a friend I'm following (similar to restaurant tips/check ins).

gcheong 14y ago

The lack of integration with my kindle is a large part of why I don't use Goodreads as much as I might otherwise but I'm kind of disappointed that it will take a buyout to get that integration rather than Amazon creating an api that would allow third-parties to integrate their services with the device directly.

quink 14y ago
I'm just hoping the older Kindles with see Goodreads integration too and that it will not be for Amazon eBooks only - and perhaps a separate Goodreads app. I've been a member since March 2008 and with three Kindles it's a minor pain to hop on Goodreads with the built-in browser. It's exactly what the eInk Kindles need. Apart from a way to get eBooks from the built-in web browser.
djhworld 14y ago
According to the owner of the site, Kindle integration will be a top priority "2. Our members have been asking us to bring the Goodreads experience to an e-reader for a long time. Now we're looking forward to bringing Goodreads to the most popular e-reader in the world, Kindle, and further reinventing what reading can be." http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/413-exciting-news-about-goodreads-we-re-joining-the-amazon-family http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/413-exciting-news-about-g...
jdroo 14y ago
This kind of capability (exporting and integrating kindle data) already exist. Take a looks at http://amazd.com/ahmad/book http://amazd.com/ahmad/book for an example.
nichodges 14y ago
It's a shame that Amazon didn't invest in creating a Kindle API rather than buying an existing service. I built http://kindred.it http://kindred.it to load up my highlights via xpath because I was so frustrated with the kindle.amazon.com UI - it seems they could benefit much more from creating an API and letting great services be built rather than acquiring what will likely be Shelfari mkII.

traeblain 14y ago

So....Shelfari is going to die now? I guess the team there with Shelfari couldn't cut it with making a good Book data site.

Narretz 14y ago
I never knew this one! Looks simpler than Goodreads, I like it. But it has the same bias towards the English edition of a book, not even highlighting the original even if I searched for it. I wonder what's gonna happen to it.
bherms 14y ago
I hope not... I find shelfari to be a far superior site than Goodreads.

jamesshamenski 14y ago

I think this is Amazon's third purchase of a social book community.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

magicmarkker 14y ago

If I can link my amazon account and have it load all of my books into goodreads that's great. Otherwise, I still won't use goodreads because I have too many books to enter manually and I'm too lazy.

Narretz 14y ago

Hopefully they will invest in development of the actual site. Its ui is inconsistent, sometimes confusing, and at times very slow. While they support many many use cases, the workflow for a simple thing like "add a book I am reading and the start date" is needlessly convulted. I also don't like how they prioritize the English version in the results even if you search for another / the original language. Especially in the latter case, the original should be highlighted. And you can only mark the edition your read, not the language explicitly.

LeeHunter 14y ago
All that's true, but it's actually one of the reasons I love the site. It's got a funky, homemade feel that I find quite charming. Part of the reason that I'm comfortable contributing my reading information to the site (~500 books so far) is that I don't feel like it's being sucked into a corporate borg. This past year I've been trying to get away from Amazon by replacing the Kindle app on my phone with Moonreader, so I'm really sad to see Goodreads get assimilated.
- caseydurfee 14y ago
  If funky and homemade is your thing, there's always librarything (which also has a real business model, so not likely to get swallowed up any time soon.)
  - movingahead 14y ago
    Apparently, Amazon holds a 40% stake in Abebooks which owns LibraryThing. From Pandodaily, "Amazon already owns Shelfari as well as Abebooks, which bought a 40-percent stake in LibraryThing in 2006, so it owns all or part of three of the top social-reading sites." http://pandodaily.com/2013/03/28/amazon-bought-goodreads-but-it-wont-break-it/ http://pandodaily.com/2013/03/28/amazon-bought-goodreads-but...
salvadors 14y ago
They actually don't prioritise the English version — they simply prioritise the version that the highest number of users have read/rated/reviewed. Sometimes this causes unexpected issues the other way round, such as with old English children's books by authors like Enid Blyton that these days are much more popular in Indonesia.

chris_mahan 14y ago

time for me to close my goodreads account I guess...

austenallred 14y ago

This acquisition makes so, so much sense. I have a goodreads account, but I never update it, mostly because it's too much time. If it were well-connected (or synced?) with my Kindle, I would use it literally weekly.

jamie_ca 14y ago
Agreed. I don't use a Kindle, but having a (optional, configurable) "Rate this book?" prompt when removing a book from my in-progress shelf would be very handy.
- bmelton 14y ago
  It's even more frustrating than that, currently, because when you finish a Kindle book, it asks if you want to tweet about it or post it on Facebook. I don't, but I very much want to post my rating of it to Goodreads, and that isn't currently an option. This fixes a big hole that a lot of people (at least, a lot of people on Goodreads) have been clamoring for. Definitely an obviously good acquisition.
- mcintyre1994 14y ago
  Considering Amazon already has a review section for each book it sells, this seems like it was already a missed opportunity. It's great they're probably not going to kill the service, but it seems like it'd have made sense to have more tightly integrated their own reviews a long time ago.
krschultz 14y ago
100%. I'm looking forward to auto-syncing my Goodread account to paper books I bought, e books on my Kindle, etc.
radicaldreamer 14y ago
My biggest complaint about Good Reads is it's confusing user interface. I would really use it a lot more if it was a little less clunky to use.

jacobheric 14y ago

I'm a sometimes Goodreads user. I'd use it more if it weren't maddeningly slow. One thing that I had noticed about Goodreads was that Amazon was always at the bottom of the online store referral list. Because of that, I took them to be Amazon hostile or adverse (perhaps reading too much into that). But, I went to the site today and now Amazon is at the top of the online store referral list.

dsyph3r 14y ago

I was never a big reader of books before I joined Goodreads. I spent a lot of time reading tech books (mostly programming related) but never fictional books. Since joining Goodreads and enjoying the social aspect Ive read so many more books. I really hope Amazon doesn't destroy this service

djhworld 14y ago

Personally I think Amazon have just purchased this site for the data. Goodreads has a fairly reasonable recommendations engine based on the book collections people have inputted into the site, so I'd imagine that information might be very interesting for Amazon to capitalise on.

vikramls 14y ago
Maybe there should be a system where the company doing the acquisition has to get permission from the acquired company's users before assimilating them... This however is not going to happen since data is so valuable.
tomkarlo 14y ago
I'm guessing Goodread's data set on book collections is maybe 1/1000th as large as Amazon's. They're more likely buying them for the community of heavy readers and the team.
- salvadors 14y ago
  The collections on Goodreads are generally more comprehensive than those on Amazon. I've added over 750 books on Goodreads, but fewer than 10% of those were purchased through Amazon.
  - tomkarlo 14y ago
    You're talking about the actual user-generated lists. Amazon also has the data on what all of their users have actually bought over time. (Hundreds of millions vs Goodreads millions.) That's what they use to create purchase recommendations, because it's higher value data than manual user-generated collections.
    - salvadors 14y ago
      Yes — Amazon certainly has significantly more data, but Goodreads' data is deeper, because it's not restricted to items bought from Amazon. Goodreads has a much better picture of what I read than Amazon could ever get simply from my purchase history (even if they cross-match with bookdepository). Being able to mine the Goodreads data too should enable them to make even higher value recommendations. (Note: I'm not claiming this is why Amazon bought them!)

travisp 14y ago

I agree that it makes a ton of sense for both companies, but how they integrate it is going to be very important. My wife and I don't use a number of Kindle features (including the current built in review feature) in part because we share our Amazon account. But, I am a big GoodReads user. If Goodreads just gets attached on a per device basis (like Twitter), then it's no problem, but if it gets integrated with the Amazon account itself (as some people seem to be suggesting) then I don't see how we (and many others like us) could use it.

k-mcgrady 14y ago
Is there a reason you both use the same Amazon account? I'm interested because we see this problem crop up every now and then. Apple ID's are another place it's been problematic. With Apple I can understand sharing the ID so you can listen to each others music collection but what are the benefits of sharing an Amazon account? Prime?
- malcolmmcc 14y ago
  I would assume the main reason is to share Kindle books.
  - k-mcgrady 14y ago
    Good point, should have thought of that. Possibly music and other media too. I always forget Amazon sells so much digital content.
- matwood 14y ago
  BTW,prime is already shareable to multiple accounts in the same household.
- pseut 14y ago
  My wife and I shared an Amazon account for a while (~10 years) because it was easier. If you live with someone and have joint finances, why bother with separate Amazon accounts?

patcon 14y ago

I'm not looking forward to this. The best community was just bought by the company that killed text-to-speech in their product in favour of making hundred of millions on audiobooks. Welcome to your new garden prison, online book community. Enjoy the complimentary bookmarks.

arjn 14y ago

How is this a good thing for readers and other book retailers ? Will we still be able see links to buy books from a number of different retailers such as B&N or Indigo ? I doubt it.

breck 14y ago

Awesome. I love Goodreads. I hope this helps them make it better.

r00fus 14y ago
What happened to other social reading sites like Shelfari that got acquired by Amazon? Amazon has a strong motive to prevent any alternate review service from gaining traction as those Amazon reviews drive sales.

austinstorm 14y ago

Nobody's talking about Shelfari, which hasn't changed since 2008 when Amazon acquired it. It got frozen in time.

LoganCale 14y ago
Not exactly true, I use it often and small features are being added to it semi-regularly.

xbryanx 14y ago

Now if Amazon will just buy LibraryThing and Discogs I can beam my obsessive library catalog consciousness up into the Amazon mothership.

jonbischke 14y ago
They are 40% of the way there with LibraryThing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibraryThing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibraryThing

jefftchan 14y ago

Besides Apple, I see Readmill [1] as another serious competitor. It provides the social integration on top of an ebook reader. However it's lacking in its catalog selection. [1] http://readmill.com http://readmill.com

myle 14y ago

A mail from a year ago (29/1/2012). We want to let you know about a change on our site that is impacting some of the books on your shelves. It's important that you read this and take action by Monday, January 30. For years, we've used Amazon's data for information such as the book title, author, and publication date. Unfortunately, the terms required by Amazon have now become so restrictive that we decided it makes better sense to work with other data sources. However, the deadline to make the transition is Amazon's, and they have told us that we must stop using their data by January 30. We have to meet this deadline. We've been adding data from other sources and now know which books still need help. You are receiving this email because we need new sources for 2 of the books on your shelves. First, please be assured that none of your reviews or ratings are in danger. Not a single review, comment, shelving, or rating will be lost in this transition. We have a system in place to preserve your reviews and comments for any books at risk until we can find new sources. That's the most important thing—your data is 100 percent safe. What can you do? The good news is you can rescue your books. Saving a book is easy. Just click the "Rescue Me!" button next to each book edition that needs help, and fill in the information on the following page. A few keystrokes can help preserve these books for millions of future readers. Rescue your books! It takes only a few clicks, and you will be doing your part to make sure these books remain available for other readers like you. We appreciate the passion you bring to Goodreads, and we apologize for the short notice. If we could have prevented this inconvenience in any way, we would have done it. Ultimately, this change will be better for the members of Goodreads and long-term success of the site. If you don't want to rescue your books, you can also export your books to a spreadsheet so you have a record of them. All the best, Otis & Elizabeth Goodreads Founders

ivankirigin 14y ago
It's weird, playing hardball with your platform for the purpose of forcing an acquisition. Do the BD & corp dev folks here think they are going to retain the founders for long, after this kind of behavior? Then again, Tony Hsieh is still at Zappos, right?
- tomkarlo 14y ago
  It seems kind of paranoid to suggest that Amazon would manipulate an API that's so central to their business for the purpose of forcing an minor acquisition. Not to mention it would probably be cheaper to just buy the target for a few million dollars.

tocomment 14y ago

Probably a dumb question ... But how does this give superior recomendations to amazons normal recomendations?

nollidge 14y ago
It doesn't. The selling points are A) the social component (what are my friends reading?) and B) keeping track of books I want to read.

runn1ng 14y ago

Book Depository getting more popular than Amozon? boom, they buy them. GoodReads having better Google positions for books than Amazon? boom, they buy them. I am personally a little afraid of this monopolistic behaviour. But hey, capitalism, I guess...

salvadors 14y ago
A lot depends on what they do with the companies they acquire. Lots of people were afraid of what would happen to BookDepository post-sale, but pretty much none of that has happened. (I'm particularly grateful that free worldwide shipping didn't disappear!)
- runn1ng 14y ago
  Their definition of "free" is fun though. Try some proxies and simulate visiting the site from different places .... yes, their prices vary based on from where you visit it, so they add the shipping to the basic prices.
  - salvadors 14y ago
    Prices sometimes also change depending on which site you're visiting. Generally these are just a few pennies, but I've seen differences of more than two or three pounds between the .com and .co.uk prices for the same book, even though theoretically they should be exactly the same.

ajju 14y ago

About time.

fakeer 14y ago

First Shelfari which Amazon bought 3 years ago and now Goodreads. In three years there's been no updates to Shelfari and that was my biggest peeve against Goodreads - lack of update) and absence of even a half decent mobile app(I use Android). So, looking at Shelfari's fate one can say that Amazon has bought it for anything but continuing the development and doing sth about it's questionable interface. Hope LibraryThing stays afloat. Would like to move my data there. Just in case.

pathikrit 14y ago

I used to be one of the engineers on shelfari. The team was kept mostly the same 4-5 guys from before acquisition and we worked on incremental stuff - integrating with Amazon sign-on, better meta data, lot's of minor UI things like better threads, series info etc etc.

drucken 14y ago

Maybe Amazon can turn Goodreads into an actual recommendation site and use the full capabilities of its databases and search facilities. To this day, since I first joined near its founding, I am astonished that there is still no way to search for the highest rated and voted books within a genre. Instead, one is left to rely on heavily skewed "Lists" or "popular" books or their (annual) Award system. In short, at this time, Goodreads for books is far less useful than say, IMDB is for movies. I actually find Goodreads less useful than Amazon itself for recommendations!

nzeeshan 14y ago

Goodreads and Amazon were two places I used to go to check out book reviews. Now I can get best of both in one place. Makes a lot of sense for Amazon to buy them.

salvadors 14y ago
Have they said that they're going to merge those?

oblique63 14y ago

I wonder if this will have an effect on Google's current scraping of goodreads reviews to fluff-up their books section on the Play store...

Groxx 14y ago

Makes a huge amount of sense for Amazon, but honestly I can only see this as a bad thing for Goodreads. Amazon has huge issues with reviews of the fulfilling company getting blended in with reviews of the actual product, and there's another layer added with media - quality of the content, completely separate from the build (pages falling out, horrible OCR, etc). Goodreads has reviews of content quality. Amazon will muddy that immensely with reviews of every other part of a sale if they do any integration into Amazon (unless they plan an overhaul of their reviewing architecture - I'd love it, but I doubt it).

salvadors 14y ago
I'm hopeful that if they integrate the reviews at all (and I'm not sure they will — I suspect there's a different plan here), it'll be solely in the Goodreads→Amazon direction. Amazon have a fairly good history of letting the companies they acquire stay fairly autonomous and independent.