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Goodreads recommendations are based on what must be one of the worst-written algorithms of all time. I swear it just recommends the top books in each category (mystery, biography etc.) that figures prominently on your bookshelf. Amazon's "other people who viewed this page bought these products", on the other hand, is a marvel, probably because it doesn't try to do anything fancy. It just shows you the purchases of people with similar tastes to your own.
Hard to know how to react to this news. The language of the press releases makes it sound like a straight-up acquisition rather than an acqui-hire, but Amazon is known for buying and then extinguishing promising startups that build on the land bordering its turf.
There was a lot said about The Kindle, but nothing about Kindle apps for 3rd party platforms. I'd be pretty happy if Goodreads integration was built into the iOS Kindle app. I hope that this will, alongside other potential improvements, solve the rather annoying problem of being unable to post status updates (which are based on physical page numbers) when reading an electronic book.
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