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Goodreads Records 6 Millionth Member and 200 Millionth Book Catalogued
Today is a very big day at Goodreads. Today we welcome our six millionth member and catalog our 200,000,000th book. That the two are happening on the same day is a coincidence, but a fitting one. After all, its our tremendous and unmatched community that makes such an enormous catalog of books possible.
So to all of our members, thank you for making our site the largest community of readers in the world.
200,000,000 books cataloged is a tremendous achievement, but even more impressive is the speed with which we've all done it. Just last June, we were celebrating our 100,000,000th book cataloged. It had taken us over three years to do it, but at the time, we were pretty pleased. And now, a little over a year later, we've doubled that number. That is astronomical growth. And we're not slowing down. In the last two weeks alone, since launching Goodreads Recommendations (powered by our community of 6,000,000 plus!), nearly 10,000,000 books have been added to our members' shelves. Apparently there's a lot of reading to be done, since almost 3,000,000 of those books were added to the to-read shelf. At that rate, we'll be celebrating book #300,000,000 before long!
Goodreads' mission is to share the love of reading. Our ever-growing community is proof that millions of others share that passion. We think the best way spread the joy of reading is to help people discover their next favorite book and share with fellow readers. We promise to continue to innovate to bring you the most cutting-edge tools to help you do both of these things. But we can't do it without you, so thanks again for being a part of the Goodreads story, and congratulations to you for being a voracious bunch of readers.
Now, let's all get back to reading. We've got over 45,000,000 books to go through on our to-read shelves!
Comments Showing 1-19 of 19 (19 new)
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Betsy
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Sep 30, 2011 01:09AM
CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!
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Great going! I'm so happy to read this. Wonderful site and great collection. Keep going :)
Any idea who lucky member #6,000,000 was? I'm curious because I just happened to join on the same day you reached that number!
Congrats! I love this site and recommend it a lot. Here's hoping the growth keeps coming :)
this just made my day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
awesome. It is an honor to be a reader and a writer here. Love this website!
Congratulations!A comment re: the Goodreads Recommendations, though. I'm not particularly impressed at all. I looked at them, and not one of the recommendations appealed to me at all - despite over 300 shelved and rated books.
On the other hand, the personalised email newsletters are fantastic - telling me new books coming out by authors whose other books I've read (and rated highly). It has led me to buy several books last year, and surprised me by how useful I found it.
For recommendations, I just don't think the algorithm will ever cut it. Use humans instead. On Flixster, users can suggest other movies that are similar to each movie. (Others then rate how good the suggestion is). I found that much more convincing that Amazon's "other people who bought what you're buying also bought..." thing, or the Goodreads recommendations. If you really want to get into the recommendations game, don't just tag an algorithm onto your existing data. Instead, ask your users directly. For each book, ask "What other books did this remind you of?" (And maybe add a "why?"). Let users rate the similarity / recommendations. Crowdsource it, but not passively. Crowdsource it through active, conscious user inputs...
Anyways. Back the the congratulations: Congratulations. I switched to Goodreads from Shelfari because Goodreads does Facebook integration and RSS feeds much better. I never regretted the move...
Congratulations! I always enjoy your data analysis posts, Patrick. :)
Congratulations! This is a great community and it certainly deserves even more members.
It's only going to get bigger and better from here! Congrats.... so happy to be a part of it all! You go, Goodreads!
Magnificent. Long live books, and those who enjoy them, whether in writing them or reading them!
Could use better integration with FB and get rid of the pop ups for posting on FB...this means my Firefox has to have its popup blocker turned off which allows other sites to use popups and not just yours. -_-
Look, I'm happy that the site's doing well and all but.... enjoy that six-million-member mark while you can. Judging by the number of users who are commenting on the "Bookswap Closing Oct. 31" post, the site's gonna lose an awful lot of active users in the next few weeks.
there ain't competition for goodreads in the near future; neither shelfari.com nor iNobi or whatever the new UK page is called.
Madeleine wrote: "Look, I'm happy that the site's doing well and all but.... enjoy that six-million-member mark while you can. Judging by the number of users who are commenting on the "Bookswap Closing Oct. 31" post..."I agree. I wonder if they factored in their success with the rise of the book swap program. I know it's how I found goodreads and why I continued to input books.
