Today Amazon announced something that I’m surprised didn’t happen a long time ago. Amazon is set to acquire Goodreads, pending various closing conditions.
With over 16 million members and over 30,000 book clubs on their website, Goodreads.com is one of the best places to go for personalized reading recommendations and to discuss and review books, so it makes a lot of sense for Amazon to acquire their services to use with their Kindle ecosystem.
It’s unclear exactly what Amazon plans to do moving forward, but we’ll likely be seeing some nifty new features integrated into Kindle devices and Kindle apps in the near future, like better reading recommendations and more sharing and social reading options.
Amazon also owns Shelfari.com and they integrated that into the X-Ray feature nicely by providing additional information about all the characters mentioned in the book. Although the feature is only available on select titles, it’s something unique that isn’t available on other platforms. Now Amazon is likely to get even more exclusive features thanks to acquiring Goodreads.
The deal is expected to be finalized by the end of June, and Goodreads’ headquarters is expected to remain in San Francisco where it was founded in 2007.
Do you think there is anything to worry about in this move? Amazon buy outs haven’t always been a good thing.
A perfect deal for Amazon! More than 16 million reader profiles ready to go for personalised advertising.
Be sure to see ads everywhere. Maybe the members will get their own Amazon recommendation shelf.
Not to forget the matching of Amazon accounts with GOODREADS accounts.
Furthermore I expect changes in the reviewing policiy for the members.
Being a member of Goodreads for some years and buying from Amazon a lot I still do not like this deal as a consumer.
What influenced my choice to sign up for Goodreads was the fact, that they seemed independent.
Now that has changed and not for good, imho. If they had been bought by some company who is not selling books, I could’nt care less (admitting that would also not have been very wise). Yahoo sprang to mind.
Ah, well let’s see what changes at Goodreads.
Amazon gets bigger and more important, and the competition gets left out to dry.
I wonder is this will be more like imdb.com acquisition than the other one Shelfari.com
It doesn’t look like Shelfari has associated apps while goodreads does. I suspect there may later be a merge of features and accounts into one site if the backends aren’t extremely incompatible.
There is amazon specific stuff on imdb but for the most part it has much of the stuff it always had.
When Amazon gets in I get out. I hate their closed ebook system on principle and want nothing to do with them.