1) Ah okay, that makes a lot of sense. I find their automated recommendations to be pretty abysmal too. I guess the idea for those without a network on the si

1) Ah okay, that makes a lot of sense. I find their automated recommendations to be pretty abysmal too. I guess the idea for those without a network on the site is to find similar users or something. 2) I'm not sure how much injection of discovery into the network graph in the first place is a concern. There's always people who like trying random new books that they see, or who read something about an author and decide to try them out, or pick up a random book in a bookstore because it looks cool, etc etc etc. I agree that it'll be a much slower process than in the publisher-gated case, but I don't see why you wouldn't see the same sort of ecosystems arise as did for indie music with independent review sites.