Product Code Database
Goodreads is an American social cataloging website operated by Goodreads Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon. Users can search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews and expand the database by registering books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. The website's offices are located in San Francisco..
Goodreads was founded in December 2006 and launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler. In December 2007, the site had 650,000 members. and 10,000,000 books had been added. By July 2012, the site reported 10 million members, 20 million monthly visits, and thirty employees. On March 28, 2013, Amazon announced its acquisition of Goodreads, and by July 23, 2013, Goodreads announced their user base had grown to 20 million members.
By September 2023, the site had more than 150 million members.
Goodreads addresses the “discoverability problem” in the digital age by providing a platform for readers to find, discuss, and share books, using user-generated reviews, recommendations, and community features to guide consumers toward titles they might enjoy. In recent years, Goodreads has faced both praise and criticism for its discoverability tools. While it remains a major source for book recommendations, critiques have pointed to a dated interface and navigation challenges that may hinder deeper engagement. In response to evolving reader needs, new platforms like The StoryGraph have emerged, offering more personalized and data-driven recommendations. Additionally, the rise of social media trends like #BookTok has reshaped the landscape of book discovery, as visually-driven, community-centered spaces gain influence in shaping reading habits.
In October 2010, the company opened its application programming interface, which enabled developers to access its ratings and titles.
In 2011, Goodreads acquired Discovereads, a book recommendation engine that employs "machine learning algorithms to analyze which books people might like, based on books they've liked in the past and books that people with similar tastes have liked." After a user has rated 20 books on its five-star scale, the site will begin making recommendations. Otis Chandler believed this rating system would be superior to Amazon's, as Amazon's includes books a user has browsed or purchased as gifts when determining its recommendations. Later that year, Goodreads introduced an algorithm to suggest books to registered users and had over five million members. The New Yorkers Macy Halford noted that the algorithm was not perfect, as the number of books needed to create a perfect recommendation system is so large that "by the time I'd got halfway there, my reading preferences would have changed and I'd have to start over again."
As of 2012, membership was required to use but free. In October 2012, Goodreads announced it had grown to 11 million members with 395 million books cataloged and over 20,000 book clubs created by its users. A month later, in November 2012, Goodreads had surpassed 12 million members, with the member base having doubled in one year.
Noting that some authors had been "too aggressive in their self-promotion" (as Goodreads admitted in an email) and that some readers had responded with aggression, in September 2013, Goodreads announced it would delete, without warning, reviews that threatened authors or mentioned authors' behavior. As of April 2020, the site's guidelines still state that "reviews that are predominantly about an author's behavior and not about the book will be deleted."
Users can add each other as "friends", enabling them to share reviews, posts, book recommendations, and messages.
Goodreads has a presence on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and other social networking sites. Linking a Goodreads account with a social networking account like Facebook enables the ability to import contacts from the social networking account to Goodreads, expanding one's Goodreads "Friends" list. There are settings available, as well, to allow Goodreads to post straight to a social networking account, which informs, e.g., Facebook friends, what one is reading or how one rated a book.
The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (version 2) and Kindle Voyage feature integration with Goodreads' social network via a user interface button. Amazon's next Kindle Paperwhite outed ahead of its official launch via Amazon's own leak .
Goodreads librarians improve book information on the website, including editing book and author information and adding cover images. Goodreads members can apply to become volunteer librarians after they have 50 books on their profile. Goodreads librarians coordinate on the Goodreads Librarian Group.
User data becomes proprietary to Goodreads though available via an application programming interface, or API, unlike similar projects like The Open Library which publish the catalog and user edits as open data. In December 2020, Goodreads deactivated API keys more than 30 days old and said it would no longer be issuing new API keys.
In May 2013, as a result of Goodreads' acquisition by Amazon, Goodreads began using Amazon's data again.
Regarding the 2013 Amazon acquisition of Goodreads, The New York Times said that: "Goodreads was a rival to Amazon as a place for discovering books" and that this deal "consolidates Amazon's power to determine which authors get exposure for their work".
Manipulative reviews ("review bombing") have occurred, with novels flooded with negative (one-star) reviews, sometimes even before publication. Such "weaponized" reviews have been described as a form of cyberbullying and targeted harassment of authors. Author Gretchen Felker-Martin's debut horror novel, about a trans woman, was review-bombed in what she suspected to be an organized campaign. Young adult fiction authors Keira Drake and Amélie Wen Zhao delayed publication of their fantasy novels after facing a tsunami of criticism on Twitter and Goodreads from users who deemed their fantasy universes to be racially insensitive. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, was flooded with negative ratings on Goodreads for her not-yet-published novel The Snow Forest from users who objected to its setting in 1930s Russia. Cecilia Rabess, a Black author, was flooded with negative reviews on Goodreads for her debut novel Everything's Fine, which focuses on a young Black woman who falls in love with a bigoted white fellow employee at Goldman Sachs; the negative reviewers had not read the work, yet deemed its premise to be racist. Some scammers and cyberstalkers have used "review bombing" threats as part of extortion campaigns, threatening to flood a work with poor reviews unless an author pays.
Goodreads said in 2021 that it takes "swift action to remove users when we determine that they violate our guidelines" and were developing technology to "prevent bad actor behavior and inauthentic reviews in order to better safeguard our community." However, authors have criticized the website's lax moderation; fantasy novelist Rin Chupeco has noted that authors from marginalized groups are often a target, saying that Goodreads only enforces its rules against reviews that specifically target "the authors with big enough marketing and publicity teams to demand these removals."
Late in 2023 author Cait Corrain was discovered to have created fake accounts that posted negative reviews of authors with upcoming debut novels, many of them women of color. Her publisher, Del Rey, cancelled the May 2024 publication of her own upcoming science fantasy debut novel, Crown of Starlight; her agent dropped her as a client. After initially denying the documented accusations, she blamed them on a friend and then finally accepted responsibility. On X (formerly Twitter), she attributed her actions to worsening depression and the attendant alcohol and substance abuse that had recently culminated in a "complete psychological breakdown", saying she would be going into rehab and apologizing profusely to not only those authors she had disparaged but a friend who had defended her initially against the accusations. Some of the authors said she needed to do more to make things right.
Fraudulent books
Jane Friedman discovered listings of six books, probably written using AI generative models (LLM), fraudulently using her name, on Amazon and Goodreads. Amazon and Goodreads resisted removing the fraudulent titles until the author's complaints went viral on social media, in a blog post titled "I Would Rather See My Books Get Pirated Than This (Or: Why Goodreads and Amazon Are Becoming Dumpster Fires)".
See also
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