Goodreads No Longer Accepting Book Data From Amazon

[Stacy-Deanne]

Hi All,

Wow. I am not the only one surprised by this. This will harm a lot of authors if they are self-published through Amazon and their books aren't available through other channels. GR has already started putting notices on top of Kindle authors' books saying they will be deleted unless someone "rescues" them. The only way they will stay is if they can get their books on other sites. I know a lot of SP authors have them on other sites but a lot of Kindle authors are only on Amazon. SP authors especially rely on GR as a major way to sell their books.

Wow. Didn't see this coming.

Read about it here:

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/7...

Best Wishes!

http://www.stacy-deanne.net

[Danielle The Book Huntress , Sees Love in All Colors]

I freely admit that I am not a big expert, but I think that it's a bad idea. Problems with Amazon aside, they are a huge purveyor of ebooks and why exclude them as a data source? Makes no sense whatsoever.

[Chaeya]

I see a major clusterf#@k coming on. I understand what they'r trying to do, but . . . it leaves a ton of work in the hands of people who really rely on Goodreads to keep track of their books, especailly those who read books in other languages who rely on Amazon to provide the info, especially if there isn't any other websites they can refer to.

We'll see.

Chaeya

[Anino]

That totally sucks & believe me when I say that it will backfire on GR..

[TinaNoir]

It isn't Goodreads' choice, though. I believe it is something coming down from Amazon. There are legal & proprietary things going on behind the scenes.

The GR folks need for ppl to source book data from non-seller sites such as worldcat, library of congress, publisher or author sites. They aren't even allowing B&N to be the source anymore either, b/c the implication is it is just a matter of time before B&N does what AZ did.

[Ridley]

I think it's good riddance to bad rubbish. Sure, Amazon offers a massive amount of data, but it came with ever increasing stipulations that limited what GR could do with it.

The transition's been kinda bumpy, but it's worth it to have data you control, especially when Amazon owns your competitors (Shelfari and Library Thing.)

[Danielle The Book Huntress , Sees Love in All Colors]

Thanks for the information, ladies. I feel better about it knowing some background.

[Roslyn]

I had to upload a cover and some info for one of my books, but that's it. I think it's a good idea to have more than one retailer. Yeah, we all know Amazon is the 800 pound gorilla and will make up the bulk of our sales, but it's never a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket. I'll never forget the day Amazon "accidentally" took down all their erotica titles. What happened once can always happen again. It took me about a week to get my book up at Smashwords, ARe, etc... And in that time I had a lot of requests from non-Kindle owners. So yeah, we have to be smart and use all platforms available to us.