Goodreads

Otis Chandler

Goodreads founders Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler first met while studying at Stanford (Engineering and English respectively). After university Chandler initially worked as a programmer in on-line businesses,[11] including dating sites,[12] and Khuri Chandler as a journalist.[13] Chandler and Khuri both grew up in California. Chandler is a descendant of the publisher of the Los Angeles Times; Otis Chandler.[14]

Goodreads was founded in 2006. The idea came about when Otis Chandler was browsing through his friend's bookshelf. He wanted to integrate this scanning experience and to create a space where people could write reviews regarding the books that they read.[15]

Goodreads addressed what publishers call the "discoverability problem" by guiding consumers in the digital age to find books they might want to read.[16]

Before gaining much traction, Otis and Elizabeth Chandler grew the platform through their friends of friends where it reached 800 users. Eventually, it gained attention through the media such as Mashable and other various blogs.[17] During its first year of business, the company was run without any formal funding. In December 2007, the site received funding estimated at $750,000 from angel investors.[6] This funding lasted Goodreads until 2009, when Goodreads received two million dollars from True Ventures.[18]

In October 2010, the company opened its application programming interface, which enabled developers to access its ratings and titles.[19]

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."[4][20] 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.[4][20] Later that year, Goodreads introduced an algorithm to suggest books to registered users and had over five million members.[21] The New Yorker's 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."[22]

As of 2012, membership was required to use but free.[23] 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.[24] A month later, in November 2012, Goodreads had surpassed 12 million members, with the member base having doubled in one year.[25]

In March 2013, Amazon made an agreement to acquire Goodreads in the second quarter of 2013 for an undisclosed sum.[26][27][28] Amazon had previously purchased the competitor Shelfari in 2008,[29] with the Goodreads purchase "stunning" the book industry. The Authors Guild called it a "truly devastating act of vertical integration" and that Amazon's "control of online bookselling approaches the insurmountable." There were mixed reactions from Goodreads users, at the time totaling 16 million members.[30] Goodreads founder Otis Chandler said that "his management team would remain in place to guard the reviewing process" with the acquisition. Chandler continued running Goodreads until 2019. The New York Times noted that Goodreads, at the time of the acquisition, had a more reputable reviewing system than Amazon's.[31]

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,[32] in September 2013, Goodreads announced it would delete, without warning, reviews that threatened authors or mentioned authors' behavior.[33] 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."[34]

In January 2016, Amazon announced that it would shut down Shelfari in favor of Goodreads, effective March 16, 2016. Users were offered the ability to export data and migrate accounts.[35] In April 2016, Goodreads announced that over 50 million user reviews had been posted to the website.[36]

On the Goodreads website, users can add books to their personal bookshelves, rate and review books, see what their friends and authors are reading, participate in discussion boards and groups on a variety of topics, and get suggestions for future reading choices based on their reviews of previously read books.[37] Once users have added friends to their profile, they will see their friends' shelves and reviews and can comment on friends' pages. Goodreads features a rating system of one to five stars, with the option of accompanying the rating with a written review. The site provides default bookshelves—read, currently-reading, to-read—and the opportunity to create customized shelves to categorize a user's books.[38]

Goodreads users can read or listen to a preview of a book on the website using Kindle Cloud Reader and Audible.[39] Goodreads also offers quizzes and trivia, quotations, book lists, and free giveaways. Members can receive the regular newsletter featuring new books, suggestions, author interviews, and poetry. If a user has written a work, the work can be linked on the author's profile page, which also includes an author's blog.[40] Goodreads organizes offline opportunities as well, such as in-person book exchanges and "literary pub crawls".[41]

The website facilitates reader interactions with authors through the interviews, giveaways, authors' blogs, and profile information. There is also a special section for authors with suggestions for promoting their works on Goodreads.com, aimed at helping them reach their target audience.[42] By 2011, "seventeen thousand authors, including James Patterson and Margaret Atwood" used Goodreads to advertise.[4]

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.[43][44][45] 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.[46]

The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (version 2) and Kindle Voyage feature integration with Goodreads' social network via a user interface button.[47]

In January 2012, Goodreads switched from using Amazon's public Product Advertising API for book metadata (such as title, author, and number of pages) to book wholesaler Ingram. Goodreads felt Amazon's requirements for using its API were too restrictive, and the combination of Ingram, the Library of Congress, and other sources would be more flexible. Some users worried that their reading records would be lost, but Goodreads had a number of plans in place to ease the transition and ensure that no data was lost, even for titles that might be in danger of deletion because they were available only through Amazon, such as Kindle editions and self-published works on Amazon.[59]

In May 2013, as a result of Goodreads' acquisition by Amazon, Goodreads began using Amazon's data again.[60]

Goodreads' review system is more easily "gamed" than other online book-review platforms, although Goodreads remains by far the most popular website for book reviews.[70][71] Amazon.com does not allow reviews to be posted for most books that have not yet been released, and Amazon book reviews indicate whether the user leaving the review purchased the book.[70] By contrast, any registered user on Goodreads (which Amazon purchased for $150 million in 2013) may rate or review a book, even before publication,[70][71] and even without receiving an advance copy.[68] Goodreads' system, as well as lax content moderation, has been criticized.[70][68] The moderation system is manual and faces a backlog of flagged reviews.[68]

Manipulative reviews ("review bombing") has occurred, with novels flooded with negative (one-star) reviews, sometimes even before publication.[70] Such "weaponized" reviews[70] have been described as a form of cyberbullying and targeted harassment of authors.[68][71] Author Gretchen Felker-Martin, whose debut horror novel about a trans women, was review-bombed, in what she suspected to be an organized campaign.[70] 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.[70] 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.[70] 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 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.[70] 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.[71][68]

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."[71] However, authors have criticized the website's lax moderation; fantasy novelist Rin Chupeco has noted that authors from marginalized groups are often a target, and she also criticized Goodreads's lax moderation, saying that Goodreads only enforces its rules against reviews that specific target an author "for the authors with big enough marketing and publicity teams to demand these removals."[71]