Amazon.com to Acquire Goodreads

[hughes]

Press release: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon...200100743.html

TechCrunch: Amazon Acquires Social Reading Site Goodreads, Which Gives The Company A Social Advantage Over Apple

[copyrite]

Wow. Is Amazon trying to take over the world or what?

[jgaiser]

Now that's interesting... Amazon now owns the top two online catalog sites - LibraryThing and Goodreads.

Edit: Correction - Amazon is a partial owner of LibraryThing

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

Now that's interesting... Amazon now owns the top two online catalog sites - LibraryThing and Goodreads.

Edit: Correction - Amazon is a partial owner of LibraryThing

They also own Shelfari

[JSWolf]

I think Amazon is buying Goodreads so they'll be able to harvest the data on who is reading what and what books are popular.

[John Carroll]

Here is Goodread's announcement: http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/4...-amazon-family

[Dazrin]

And the engadget take on it. http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/28/a...dation-engine/

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I think Amazon is buying Goodreads so they'll be able to harvest the data on who is reading what and what books are popular.

Duh... I'm not sure that's a bad thing. While I still have a paid account on LibraryThing, I find myself spending more time on Goodreads.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by John Carroll

Here is Goodread's announcement: http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/4...-amazon-family

Very interesting to read the comments posted on this link. People seem to have mixed feelings.

[John Carroll]

Email that all Goodreads librarians just received:

"Today is a very big day for all of us at Goodreads. As you may have seen on our blog, we are joining the Amazon family.

We greatly appreciate all you do as a Goodreads Librarian so we wanted to reach out to you individually since you play an important role in our community.

You’ll be glad to know that this announcement is great news for our catalog. Amazon metadata will be returning to the site, and we will have an even more comprehensive record of self-published books, as well as more complete records of international books. We will continue to link to a variety of sites on our book pages, of course, including OCLC WorldCat for library data. All of your reviews and ratings will remain on Goodreads.

By joining the Amazon family, the Goodreads team will be able to invest more in the things that our members care about. We’ll also be working together on inventing new services for readers and authors. As part of this, we’ll be increasing the size of our team over time, and will be able to add lots of great new features that members and librarians will be excited about!

I can’t make this clear enough – we plan to continue growing Goodreads and investing in making it a great community for librarians, and everyone else.

We said in our blog post that our team gets out of bed every day motivated by the belief that the right book in the right hands can change the world. Now Goodreads can help make that happen in an even bigger and more meaningful way as part of the Amazon family.

Here’s to the next chapter!

Otis, Elizabeth, and the Goodreads Team"

[kennyc]

Well then!

Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-0...over-book.html

[booklover6]

goodreads has recommendations? LOL. I use adblock plus so don't see any adds on my main feed page.

[David Munch]

Personally I can only hope that this means a better interface in the future for GR. The current one is absolutely horrible, and a pain to navigate.

[whitearrow]

I wonder if GR and Shelfari will merge at some point.

[pixiestyx]

Originally Posted by booklover6

goodreads has recommendations? LOL. I use adblock plus so don't see any adds on my main feed page.

I've never had ads show up in my GR feed, the only ad is a small section down on the side that I usually don't scroll down far enough to see anyway. There is a separate recommendation section based on what is on your shelves but I rarely use that page. More often than not, I find "recommendations" by keeping an eye on what friends are rating and reading - not something you can easily do on Amazon as far as I know.

I for one *really* hope that they keep everything separate. I never use Amazon or Barnes and Noble reviews to decide on a book. Too many "junk" reviews to sift through...always felt the reviews on Goodreads were better quality (whether they were positive or negative).

Was planning to jump ship to LibraryThing if needed...but hearing they are partial owner of that too...