Remember when Facebook was for kids?  You’d heard of it, but dismissed it as irrelevant.  Why would I need some site to connect me, you may have thought, when I’ve already figured out email?  And, of course, there’s still the phone or–god forbid–letter writing.

But then someone convinced you to set up your own account, and you fiddled with it for a while, then forgot about it.  Eventually, however, you started getting requests from “friends” that became interesting–your college roommate from sophomore year, a long-lost traveling companion from your backpacking-across-Europe adventure, an old friend who turns out to be a great networking connection in your field–and you found yourself on the site more often, even posting updates, or sharing links.

And then you heard references to Goodreads.  At first, it was just for publishers, self-published authors, or people aspiring to be book reviewers. Yet gradually, Goodreads has become the go-to on-line site for book recommendations and discussions.   With book stores waning in influence, and on-line sites increasingly steering book-buying practices, this is no small affair.

According to The Atlantic, several weeks ago, Amazon shelled out $150 million to purchase Goodreads, a strategy approved of by media analysts.  The reason?  Well, there’s the fact that Amazon now has access to data on the most influential readers in the country to feed into their algorithms.  (Can we say, Big Brother?)  The purchase also prevents competitors like Barnes and Noble from getting their hands on the throttle.  But the main reason?  According to The Atlantic correspondent Jordan Weismann, “the publishing industry survives on super fans–book worms who read far more than most Americans, and who tell their friends what to read as well. By picking up Goodreads, Amazon gets to tap into those super fans.  Simple.”

The Atlantic article link below has some telling graphs worth examining.  Basically, it boils down to the fact that 19% of readers (the super fans) do 79% of the reading, and 21% of the book recommending.  Goodreads is their platform.  Another sad, though perhaps not surprising statistic, is that almost 50% of Americans have not read a book in the last year.

How people are finding books (remember discoverability from last week’s article?) is evolving, with online media/marketing and personal recommendations asserting greater influence over book buying, and brick-and-mortar stores less.  However, what they seem not to be relying on are recommendation engines from Amazon.  Maybe those whose response to the Amazon takeover was “end-of-the-world doom and gloom,” should take heart at this dip in Amazon’s credibility?

Read the entire The Atlantic article.

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Written by: Fuze Publishing on April 10, 2013.on August 13, 2018.