I have to admit that I yelped this morning when news of the acquisition of GoodReads by Amazon crossed my newsfeeds.
The yelp was one of pure dismay. You see, I use GoodReads on a daily basis. Not only to keep track of my personal reading but to make sure that children’s books that I review on my other blog don’t get missed. I post all of my reviews to GoodReads, feeling comfortable because they connected to libraries and a variety of retailers.
This changes things for me. Frankly, I don’t have a lot of interest in participating in building the Amazon empire even through my own small efforts. And, as we all know, buying a company can mean many things, but I’d be completely flabbergasted if Amazon does not become integral to GoodReads and selling of the books on Kindle doesn’t become a focus of the site.
We can also look at what happened with Shelfari, another book site acquired by Amazon. It never got any attention and faded.
I’d say that they have to be very careful. There are multiple competitors out there for GoodReads already. Some, like Riffle, are far more colorful and modern feeling. Others like LibraryThing are long-time survivors and real library supporters. Take a look at Tim Spalding’s take on their future.
