GoodReads a popular social network for book readers and authors has been acquired by e-commerce giant Amazon. GoodReads is mainly a website that allows users to list books they have read and add reviews.
GoodReads is mainly a also social network, because users can follow the book reading activities and reviews by their friends. This really took off with Facebook integration which allows people to follow their Facebook friends and also post GoodReads activity on their Facebook timelines.
This was a great acquisition for Amazon as GoodReads would have been for interesting to Google and Apple who are also into selling books. For being a social networking product, I am sure Facebook might have been interested too.
Though GoodRead’s has a user-base of 16 million which might seem insignificant compared to the hundreds of millions of users registered on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.
But these users are typically people (includes me) who buy books online (print and digital) so it will be great opportunity to sell books to these users. Also more importantly a lot of these users are authors who also keep a close eye on book reviews and ratings of their books. Overall GoodReads will be a gold mine of data for Amazon.
Thankfully according to GoodReads blog, it looks like Amazon will keep the GoodReads branding and features intact and keep it an independent platform for book readers.