Goodreads Choice Award
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Type of site
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Book |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Amazon.com (from Q2 2013 on) |
| Created by | Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri |
| Website | goodreads |
| Alexa rank |
 366 (June 2017[update]) |
| Commercial | yes |
| Registration | Free |
| Launched | December 2006 |
| Current status | Active |
Goodreads is an Amazon company and "social cataloging" website founded in December 2006 and launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler, II, a software engineer and entrepreneur, and Elizabeth Khuri. The website allows individuals to freely search Goodreads' database of books, annotations, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys/polls, blogs, and discussions.
In December 2007, the site had over 650,000 members and over 10,000,000 books had been added. By July 2012, the site reported 10 million members, 20 million monthly visits, and 30 employees. On July 23, 2013, it was announced on their website that the user base had grown to 20 million members, having doubled in close to 11 months. The website's offices are in San Francisco.
On March 28, 2013, Amazon announced its acquisition of Goodreads for an undisclosed amount.
The Chandlers created Goodreads in 2006. Goodreads' stated mission is "to help people find and share books they love... [and] to improve the process of reading and learning throughout the world." Goodreads also addressed "what publishers call the 'discoverability' problem" by guiding consumers in the digital age to find books they might want to read.
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. This funding lasted Goodreads until 2009, when Goodreads received two million dollars from True Ventures. In October 2010 the company opened its application programming interface, which enabled developers to access its ratings and titles. Goodreads also receives a small commission when a user clicks over from its site to an online bookseller and makes a purchase.
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." 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. Later that year, Goodreads introduced an algorithm to suggest books to registered users and had over five million members.The New Yorker's Macy Halford noted that the algorithm wasn't 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."
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