aha!

[telophase]

Read this article about Goodreads on the New Statesman today, which suddenly makes the Amazon book clubs beta I mentioned in a previous post make sense...

[referring to an earlier statement on Amazon not doing anything with Goodreads] Critchlow believes all of this all contributes to Amazon doing next to nothing to improve Goodreads’s functionality. Amazon has very little incentive to improve Goodreads while no serious competitor exists and its “core experience” is good enough. “It sees no real threat, so it isn’t about to invest behind any major new development,” he tells me.
[...]
[and then a bit later, about the founder of TheStoryGraph, a new book-discussion site] Odunayo didn’t want to simply create a rejigged version of Goodreads. Instead, she tried to find specific “pain points” where readers were truly desperate for something Goodreads didn’t offer them. “Through my research I essentially ended up on ‘choosing your next book to read’ and ‘finding persistently high-quality recommendations’ being the major pain points”. The StoryGraph has spent the past year fine-tuning an algorithm that throws up books its users will genuinely enjoy.

Seems to me that people got it wrong: Amazon wasn't leaving Goodreads alone because of the perception of no competition, they were instead working on their own solution to the problem.

Comments

[torachan]

Ugh, I hope that doesn't mean they are planning to abandon GR. I don't want a book club! I want what GR is right now, a site where I can keep track of my reading and also see what my friends are reading and maybe find new titles through that.

[adafrog]

Amen.

[telophase]

I never got into GR, but I know a lot of people who did. With luck, they'll have the Amazon one for forum-like discussions and GR for the cataloging/rating/other social stuff.

(weird, I never got this notification!)