"goodreads" entries
Discovery and data go hand in hand
The fourth in a series looking at the major themes of this year's TOC conference.
Several overriding themes permeated this year's Tools of Change for Publishing conference. The fourth in a series looking at five of the major themes, here we take a look at discovery in publishing.
Publishing News: B&N closes doors on Amazon Publishing
B&N shuns Amazon, Goodreads shuns Amazon, Jonathan Franzen shuns ebooks.
Barnes & Noble ramped up its battle with Amazon this week by shutting it out of its stores. Elsewhere, Goodreads broke up with Amazon’s data API and Jonathan Franzen declared ebooks will be the downfall of civilization.
The more you engage, the better the advice
Patrick Brown on the Goodreads recommendation engine and fine-tuning discoverability.
The Goodreads recommendation engine has been in development for six years. In this podcast, Patrick Brown, community manager at Goodreads, talks about that development process and how the algorithm works.
Publishing News: Goodreads chases the recommendation Holy Grail
A new kind of book recommendation appears at Goodreads and HTML5 had a very big week in the media world.
Goodreads put its Discovereads purchase to good use. Also, Hearst and The Boston Globe are doubling down on HTML5.
Goodreads vs Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow
I am never more painfully reminded of the limits of symmetric “friend” -based social networks than I am when I post a book review on Goodreads. I love books, and I love spreading the word about ones I enjoy (as well as ones I expected to enjoy, but didn’t quite). Most of the time, my reviews go out quietly to a small group of friends, whose book recommendations I also follow. It’s a lovely social network. But every once in a while, I post a link to one of my reviews on Twitter, and am immediately deluged with friend requests. Some of them are from people I know, but whose taste in books I may not share (or even care about), and many are from complete strangers. If I say “yes” to any of them, I have to see every book they review as well. As you can imagine, it doesn’t scale.
Tim O'Reilly: Social Networks as Infrastructure, Not Apps
Using Amazon's acquisition of Shelfari as a jumping-off point, Tim O'Reilly stresses the need for social network interoperability. From Radar: Some of my friends prefer LibraryThing. Others may prefer Shelfari. But I only network with those on Goodreads because that's the service I ended up using first. What a shame that I can't see what my friends on LibraryThing…