Giant Amazon has bought the reader-recommendation site Goodreads:
Exciting news! Goodreads is joining the Amazon family to bring more book discussion to readers everywhere. bit.ly/YMjqVV
— goodreads (@goodreads) March 28, 2013
From Goodreads Owner Otis Chandler:
Today I'm really happy to announce a new milestone for Goodreads: We are joining the Amazon family. We truly could not think of a more perfect partner for Goodreads as we both share a love of books and an appreciation for the authors who write them. We also both love to invent products and services that touch millions of people.
I'm excited about this for three reasons:
1. With the reach and resources of Amazon, Goodreads can introduce more readers to our vibrant community of book lovers and create an even better experience for our members.
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.
3. Amazon supports us continuing to grow our vision as an independent entity, under the Goodreads brand and with our unique culture.
It's important to be clear that Goodreads and the awesome team behind it are not going away. Goodreads will continue to be the wonderful community that we all cherish. We plan to continue offering you everything that you love about the site—the ability to track what you read, discover great books, discuss and share them with fellow book lovers, and connect directly with your favorite authors—and your reviews and ratings will remain here on Goodreads. And it's incredibly important to us that we remain a home for all types of readers, no matter if you read on paper, audio, digitally, from scrolls, or even stone tablets.
For all of you Kindle readers, there's obviously an extra bonus in this announcement. You've asked us for a long time to be able to integrate your Kindle and Goodreads experiences. Making that option a reality is one of our top priorities.
(More at Link)
Publisher's Weekly
Amazon has acquired Goodreads.com, a Web site featuring user-generated reviews of books. The purchase comes amid mounting rumors that Goodreads, which CEO Otis Chandler launched in 2007, might start selling books directly from its site.
. . . Goodreads will remain headquartered in San Francisco. The site currently has over 16 million members, averages 37 million unique visitors a month, and has over 30,000 book clubs.
When asked how Goodreads would be integrated into Amazon, and the all-important question of how, and when, a retail component might be rolled into the site--currently users can buy books through a host of third party retailers, including Amazon--both Chandler and Russ Grandinetti, Amazon v-p, Kindle content, skirted the subject. When pressed, Chandler said: "We don't have any plans to change anything about the buy links in the short term, but in the long term we're going to do what's best for our users."
The merger could be a business opportunity for rival sites to pick up business from booksellers who have to go elsewhere now that Amazon controls Goodreads. For instance LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding wrote:
With Amazon in the drivers’ seat, you can bet that B&N, Kobo and Indies are going to drop and be dropped by Goodreads like a hot potato. If any non-Amazon “buy” buttons remain, they’re going to be buried deep. And B&N is hardly going to encourage people to use Goodreads now that every item of data Goodreads get goes to build Amazon and the Kindle features Goodreads is promising. In short, we gained a lot of friends today.
More from Tim Spalding Here.
The blog Book Riot has posted a list of other review sites where disgruntled members could land.
12 Alternatives to Goodreads from Book Riot
Basically, the idea of Amazon swallowing up what some people saw as an intellectual haven fostered nervousness and some anger among the Bibliophiles. Let's just say they weren't that impressed.
seriously, goodreads? screw you for being a sellout.
— rebeccaherman (@rebeccamherman) March 29, 2013
"Joins" Ha. Ha. Good one. Like Poland "joined" The Third Reich. RT @submittable GoodReads joins Amazon: goodreads.com/blog/show/413-… …
— Rob Spillman (@robspillman) March 28, 2013
A Goodreads Spoiled: All Your Books Are Belong To Amazon
~ Headline by Brian Ford on ReadWrite
Amazon purchase of Goodreads stuns book industry...many readers and authors reacted negatively to the news. American writers' organisation the Authors' Guild called the acquisition a "truly devastating act of vertical integration" which meant that "Amazon's control of online bookselling approaches the insurmountable". Bestselling legal thriller author Scott Turow, president of the Guild, said it was "a textbook example of how modern internet monopolies can be built".
~ Guardian UK
Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads will ... enhance the market position of the market’s largest player. If Amazon owns Goodreads, then no other book retailer does. It seems entirely possible that some other book retailer could have combined with Goodreads to offer Amazon some serious competition. If this is a done deal, we’ll never know.
~ Joel Waldfogel on Digitopoly
Damn. Looks like Amazon bought goodreads. betting it'll be screwed up completely in a year. Guess I'd better go look at the export options.
— furicle (@furicle) March 29, 2013
Everyone knows Amazon has the crazy angry reader reviews & Goodreads has the shruggy dismissive ones. Reading them together WILL KILL ME.
— Wendy McClure (@Wendy_Mc) March 29, 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment