Sold!

So, yesterday the news broke that the owners of Goodreads have sold their site to Amazon.

For me, I actually learned about this early yesterday morning, while I was lying in bed browsing friends’ reviews and comments on Goodreads itself. I clicked back from a review to my home page and lo and behold, the link to the blog post announcing the sale was at the top of my screen. I am not exaggerating when I say that my first response was dismay. My second was to double check the date: it’s not April 1st, yet, is it?? (I do normally know what day it is but I was happily in holiday mode and all ideas of dates and schedules had been banished from my mind.)

Why dismay, you ask?

Why indeed. I own a Kindle Paperwhite* and have bought ebooks and treebooks from Amazon, so it’s not as if I refuse to do business with the company out of principle, or anything like that. I’ve been pondering my gut reaction to this, and this comment on the LibraryThing website sums it up:

If I was to go to a friends house to have a bookclub I wouldn’t want it sponsored by a big corporation. I wouldn’t want ads to buy things from them. I wouldn’t want them sitting in the corner collecting the data from my book club.

Why would I want that in my internet version of a bookclub?

That’s exactly it. For me, Goodreads was not about buying or owning books, it was about reading books, finding out what others thought about them, and learning about other books to add to my never-ending To Read List. Some of these books I might have owned, some I borrowed. That was not the point. The point was the reading, the discussion and the learning.

The idea that Amazon will now have easy access to this sort of data about my reading habits, via Goodreads, is repugnant to me.

I haven’t yet deleted my account on Goodreads, but I’m going to stop adding to it, and I’ll just wait and see what happens to the site after Amazon’s taken over. I’ve taken off the Goodreads widgets on this blog (no point, if I’m not adding my new reads there), and will go back to my old way of tracking my reads, here on my blog, and via various offline methods.

It’s a shame, because Goodreads was fast becoming a part of my online routine. It was very easy to use to track books, a great resource for reviews, and I was slowly getting into the habit of putting up my own reviews/notes there. I suppose I will just have to do that here.

In this past fortnight two services I’ve been using, Goodreads and Google Reader, have announced major changes. Both were free sites. I’ve really been pondering that statement: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product“. I know I’ve already given a lot of my personal data to these major companies. The services they offer are enticing: easy to use, convenient, you get to do interesting things with them, you pay nothing, and they get completely embedded into your life.

*I keep my Paperwhite as a “dumb” device. I don’t use it in wifi mode. If I’m going to add a book to it, I do so via USB. It’s slower and much more inconvenient to do it this way, but I just don’t like the idea of anyone tracking everything I read, how quickly or slowly I read, or looking at my notes, at any given point. (That said, the Kindle Paperwhite is a great ereader. I think it’s the nicest one I’ve used yet. But that’s for another post.) Yes, I know I happily TELL you all about what I read (you can look at my blog and see my reading list, and I summarise my year’s reading every year), but I do not wish to be feeding all my data to a company by every action I take.