By now, we’ve all heard about Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads, the popular social media hub for book fans. I’ve seen a lot of speculation–including here at Teleread–about what this means for the future of Goodreads. This article at Paid Content is the first to answer that question straight from the horse’s mouth, by posing it to Otis Chandler, Goodreads’ CEO.
Some highlights:
• You can expect to see “customizations and better integrations for people who do use Kindle,” but for everyone else, the site will “largely remain as it is.”
• Goodreads will be a subsidiary of Amazon, so ‘on one level’ Amazon will have access to the site’s information. But Chandler seems wary of things “happening in the background” without a user’s knowledge; he aims to make any Amazon integrations transparent to the site’s users.
• They haven’t decided yet what to do about user reviews; whether to merge the Goodreads and Amazon reviews or keep them separate. This may be an area where making your feelings known now, as a user, might help shape things in a good direction for the site.
• Regarding bookstore links and retail components, Chandler says, “we really think about it from the user perspective. If users really want those links [to other retailers], then those links will probably still be there.”
You can read the whole article for more on Amazon’s expansion plans for the site, the utility of Amazon’s metadata, what this means for Kobo and others who use Goodreads’ review feeds, and other details.
Oh, my God, I hope they don’t merge the reviews. Those on Goodreads are much superior, as a rule, to those on Amazon. How would we contact someone (and who?) to make our views known?
As a self-published writer, it would be kind of nice to see the reviews merged–or even just to see it as an option! Still I can understand why no one would want that.
I do not want them to merge the reviews either. I enjoy Goodreads so much. … sigh