Cue the Ambivalence Machine. Goodreads has just “joined the Amazon family.”
While all indies should be happy and thankful that Amazon helped break traditional publishing’s stranglehold on the market, lack of competition–or in this case, a blow to independent reporting and reviewing–isn’t really good for anyone.
It will be interesting to see how other book distributors like Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple react. Is this the warning bell Apple needs to get off their ass and actually make iBooks work? Will Kobo take the challenge and soak their parent company Rakuten for more bank to fight the good fight?
Or are we watching the end game?
Hmmm… Wonder what this will mean? I assume they won’t be linking to other bookstores anymore, right?
Nope, don’t see it happening. On the other hand, authors never had control over directing GR users to a particular distributor…it was always a user preference. I imagine THAT’s going to change now, lol.
Glad I was putting all my eggs in the right basket…
I don’t like it. Goodreads was supposed to be an impartial place for us Book Addicts to go and play. If they do a bunch of dicky changes requiring us to bow down and worship the all mighty Amazon I’ll leave it and look for something else.
Well, there’s always Shelfari (j/k…it’s owned by Amazon).
Man, I was just in the process of moving my data over from Librarything, but I’m thinking I’ll stick around there a little longer. If only they’d modernize their interface… Maybe this will give them a kick in the pants.
That sucks. I liked that I could review on Goodreads without worrying about if I would tick off the masses and get all the negative buttons pushed on my reviews. I always thought Goodreads was just an impartial website to keep track of books and have fun. Amazon has changed books in so many positive ways but feel like quality has gone down a check of a lot. Such a shame.