January 30, 2012

Goodreads quits sourcing data from “restrictive” Amazon

by Dennis Johnson

More signs of push-back against Amazon this weekend: Goodreads, the literary social networking site that not only allows readers to discuss books they’re reading, but offers core data about those books, allows readers to store and share information about what they’re reading, and facilitates buying those books, announced on Friday that new terms from Amazon for using that data were “so restrictive” that Goodreads is taking its business elsewhere.

According to a Paid Content report by Laura Hazard Owen, a company statement says “the terms now required by Amazon have become so restrictive that it makes better business sense to work with other data sources.” So as of January 30, GoodReads is switching over to Ingram, the book wholesaler.

As Own details it:

Specifically, Goodreads finds two requirements of Amazon’s API licensing agreement too restrictive. Amazon requires sites that use its API to link that content back to the Amazon site exclusively—so a book page on Goodreads would have to link only to its product page on Amazon, and not to any other source or retailer. Goodreads links to many online retailers. “Our goal is to be an open place for all readers to discover and buy books from all retailers, both online and offline,” the company told me. Amazon also does not allow any content from its API to be used on mobile sites and apps.

The changes take place January 30. Goodreads’ new data source is book wholesaler Ingram. Goodreads will pay to license data from Ingram, and will supplement it with book records from the Library of Congress and other sources.

The company’s announcement stresses to members that “Not a single review, comment, shelving, or rating will be lost in this transition. That’s the most important thing—your data is 100% safe.”

So what about books that are only available through Amazon — say, self-published Kindle books? “We anticipate keeping these, and will bend over backwards for all our authors who publish via Kindle to make sure their readers on Goodreads have a smooth transition,” says the statement … although why do I get the sense they don’t mean it?

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

2 Comments

Tim Spalding at 12:19 pm on January 30, 2012

Hey. I’m the guy who runs LibraryThing so, well, not unbiased. A few points:

Goodreads doesn’t buy Amazon data. Nobody does. Amazon’s data is provided for free, but under conditions. Those conditions can be onerous. We’ve chafed under them too, a lot. That said, our members would murder us if we switched from 700 libraries and all the national Amazons to a single and hardly complete new-books supplier, Ingram.

Criticism aside, the world needs a repository of Kindle ASIN data that Amazon doesn’t own. Goodreads clearly needs it, but so do libraries, who simply can’t accept a situation where their core bibliographic data—the thing they do better than anyone and that is, in a sense, foundational to their mission—is subject to some company’s arbitrary EULA. Needless to say, nothing prevents the accumulation of such data, so long as it is not pulled from Amazon under terms.
Melville House Publishing at 2:15 pm on January 30, 2012

Tim — Thanks for the correction; I’ve changed the text above to say “using” the data (in graf 1) instead of “buying.”

Thanks, too, for the further details on the significance of the missing Kindle data.

— Dennis Johnson