Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it • Hacker News Board

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#51

Post by crossroadsguy » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #6

Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all. But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive. Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else…

I see many startups claiming, and in fact starting their existence with the very declaration or on the pretext, that “We are not like X. We are not going anywhere. We are not for sale” et cetera, I am pretty sure most of those founders would have been spending sleepless nights giddy fantasising about the moment when X acquires them.

So now any social network kind of service, which isn’t legally non-profit and open source and preferably federated, doesn’t get any cookie from me including the ones like LetterBoxd and StoryGraph.

But the problem is federated services, where you have to “choose” an instance among other frictions and all, are kinda doomed to fail. So I just use the established ones until they are unusable and keep my data regularly exported if it’s worth exporting, that is. It’s just sad.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#52

Post by blackoil » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

sdfghswe wrote: post #43

crazygringo wrote: post #6

Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all. But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive. Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else…

Why do you think that Amazon is concerned that a database is enough to threaten their business?

Its not database but customer gateway that matters. If Goodreads has B&N link prominently some customers will move.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#53

Post by thebigspacefuck » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #12

Eh, Goodreads has always suffered from the same problem that plagues every other review system which uses "score out of X" ranking. Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book…

IIRC they initially gave you a text for each star like

1 - I hated it

2 - It was okay

3 - I liked it

4 - It was great

5 - I loved it

I thought it was helpful for framing what a score would be but I haven’t seen this in the app or anywhere for a long time. At least it avoids the problem of Amazon where a review is like “Best book I’ve ever read but the copy I received had a rip on the dust jacket - 1/5”.

Learned through experience to skip anything below a 4 or very high 3 now. Probably missing some interesting stuff but I don’t read that often anyway.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#54

Post by bacchusracine » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

CaptainZapp wrote: post #7

> By joining Amazon, Goodreads has accelerated their mission to delight customers with the help of Amazon’s resources and technology. Seriously, reading the diarrhea vomited out by corporate PR shills nowadays seriously makes my teeth hurt. Do those people actually believe the bullshit they're spouting to the general public?

>Do those people actually believe the bullshit they're spouting to the general public?

With the kinds of salaries they make? Absolutely! I'll believe your butt makes chocolate ice cream for the kind of money those people make ^1.

^1 testing the theory on the other hand...not so much.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#55

Post by tivert » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

sdfghswe wrote: post #43

crazygringo wrote: post #6

Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all. But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive. Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else…

Why do you think that Amazon is concerned that a database is enough to threaten their business?

> Why do you think that Amazon is concerned that a database is enough to threaten their business?

Didn't the GP already answer the question you asked of them?

>> It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else from acquiring or partnering with Goodreads, because their database of books and reviews could be used to instantly start competing with Amazon's book business. Amazon snuffed out that threat of competition in an instant.

A catalog of user reviews is a pretty important feature for a successful eCommerce site. To the point where I've seen some "review sharing" between non-Amazon sites (the specific case was an eCommerge platform showing reviews from their own site and the manufacturer's direct-to-customer site). Goodreads was ready-made to provide that to a competitor, which would give them a shortcut around that moat.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#56

Post by jbaber » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #23

i've been "using" goodreads since long before amazon bought it, and it's always just been kind of terrible. It was a clunky, not terribly nice to use site full of absolutely garbage-tier book reviews. the only redeeming quality was the authors who would leave honest reviews on each other's books. i wish there was a site like goodreads, but good. but goodreads was not on track to be that site before amazon took it ove…

I've been liking the recommendations from https://thestorygraph.com a lot. They can import your goodreads reviews.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#57

Post by crossroadsguy » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

AlbertCory wrote: post #16

crazygringo wrote: post #6

Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all. But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive. Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else…

I think this is correct. The acquisition was anti-competitive, and Lina Khan's FTC would probably challenge it.

You mean in retrospect? Is that a thing? If so, how do you folks (assuming here) trigger it - some petition? Or FTC picks its own bespoke fights if at all?

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#58

Post by hospitalJail » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

CaptainZapp wrote: post #7

> By joining Amazon, Goodreads has accelerated their mission to delight customers with the help of Amazon’s resources and technology. Seriously, reading the diarrhea vomited out by corporate PR shills nowadays seriously makes my teeth hurt. Do those people actually believe the bullshit they're spouting to the general public?

At least Apple's marketers will say things like

"While I don't like that they do X, they are the best at Y, and they need to do X for your safety"

You get what you pay for.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#59

Post by michaelmrose » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

sdfghswe wrote: post #43

crazygringo wrote: post #6

Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all. But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive. Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else…

Why do you think that Amazon is concerned that a database is enough to threaten their business?

Presumably if it is effective enough people might start their search for a book on the site and if so why not finish it there? The vertical integration is fairly obvious you basically need a buy link and a way to deliver. With kindle if I understand correctly all you need is the email address required to send to it. If you had enough customers you could work with other ebook reader hardware as well.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#60

Post by atlasunshrugged » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

blackoil wrote: post #52

sdfghswe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that Amazon is concerned that a database is enough to threaten their business?

Its not database but customer gateway that matters. If Goodreads has B&N link prominently some customers will move.

It also gives them significant power over authors (and therefore publishers). If you know that a huge portion of demand via Amazon purchases (where many people will purchase your book) will be correlated to the goodreads review, you're going to optimize for that platform. I've seen this before with friends who are new authors that send out their books and their biggest ask is to give it five stars and a good review on goodreads... which drives more traffic to Amazon and creates a flywheel for them. Plus, the direct integration after you read a book on Kindle to quickly give a book a star rating means that you want your Kindle version to be optimized/prioritized not just because of the market of Kindle readers, but because it'll send more traffic to feed into your rankings and therefore affect your demand more.