Amazon (@amazon) has acquired Goodreads (@goodreads), a website featuring user-generated reviews of books. Goodreads, which is one of the most popular among a raft of sites created as a book recommendation engine – members are directed to titles by seeing what their friends are reading, or have recommended – does not currently sell any books, but many in the industry saw it as an ideal sales outlet.
The site currently has over 16 million members, averages 37 million unique visitors a month, and has over 30,000 book clubs.
Read Goodreads announcement.
Salon (@Salon) says the “brilliant business move” shows Amazon is “determined to monopolize book publishing.”
In just five years Goodreads has grown into the largest outlet for armchair reviewers and readers to share their opinions, as well as a safe space for author-reader interactions. Most members saw Goodreads as an unbiased haven for books, a place where they could profess their bookish love free from the ugly noise of commerce. And the noise has certainly been ugly the past few years, with the closing of Borders and many independent bookstores, the consolidation of the corporate publishers, the e-book pricing wars. In the background of all this ugliness has been the rise of Amazon and their unabashedly thuggish way of doing business
Forbes (@Forbes) sees the purchase as an assault against Bookish (@BookishHQ).
TOC (@toc) declares, "Amazon marches on toward global retail domination."
And Huff Post Books (@HuffPostBooks) asks, “What Does It Mean for Authors and Readers?”
Also read our previous blogposts, “What's Going On With Readers Today?” and “All About Goodreads.”
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