Amazon announced plans to acquire Goodreads, the social network for readers, yesterday afternoon. Many people expressed disappointment about the news on Twitter. While Goodreads, assured fans that the team behind the community is not going away, for those of you looking for an alternative to the soon-to-be Amazon company, we’ve made a list of five other social networks for readers. We’ve included links and the site’s description to help give you an idea of what these various social networks for authors have to offer.

5 Alternatives to Goodreads

1. weRead: “weRead is your own online virtual bookshelf and a great community for book lovers. Whether you love classics or popular fiction; whether you love Dickens or Dan Brown; weRead is a place where you can find others who share your reading tastes and through them discover new books that you will absolutely love.” Read more

It’s been less then two hours since we reported the news that Amazon has acquired the popular online reading community Goodreads and Twitter users are already lamenting the news.

Susan Kostal tweeted: “sooo sad to see that Amazon bought Goodreads”

Sarah Rhea Warner wrote: “One of my favorite online communities, @goodreads, was just acquired by Amazon. Kinda bummed.”

Amanda Clark tweeted: “I’m not happy about Goodreads being bought by Amazon! Those bastards took away our like button, and won’t let you mention the author by name.”

Susan McNicholl tweeted: “Not sure I like this at all. Amazon taints everything it touches.”

Marcia Ferguson wrote: “Sad to see that Amazon is buying#Goodreads … I always thought of Goodreads as a nice place for indie store readers.” Read more

Amazon announced today that they will acquire Goodreads, the social network for readers.

UPDATE: Goodreads posted this message about the implications of the purchase, especially for device owners:

It’s important to be clear that Goodreads and the awesome team behind it are not going away. Goodreads will continue to be the wonderful community that we all cherish. We plan to continue offering you everything that you love about the site—the ability to track what you read, discover great books, discuss and share them with fellow book lovers, and connect directly with your favorite authors—and your reviews and ratings will remain here on Goodreads. And it’s incredibly important to us that we remain a home for all types of readers, no matter if you read on paper, audio, digitally, from scrolls, or even stone tablets. For all of you Kindle readers, there’s obviously an extra bonus in this announcement. You’ve asked us for a long time to be able to integrate your Kindle and Goodreads experiences. Making that option a reality is one of our top priorities.

Read more

Goodreads can help you track your library collection, discuss plot points, leak spoilers, and today it added a major new feature. Now it has a recommendation engine that can help you find a book you like.

This new service is based on the technology developed by Discovereads, a company that was bought by Goodreads a few months back. Goodreads then fed all its member records into  the recommendation engine. That’s over 6 million members who have an average of 140 books on their shelves.

The recommendation engine measures over 20 billion data points. It tracks the reviews of a book, of course, but it also tracks when and where each book is read by each user. It also notes the relationship between books; for example, if a large number of users go from book A to B to C then a user who has already read A and B might want to read C.

It’s open to all registered users, and Goodreads wants you to rate 20 books so the recommendation engine can get a good feel for what you like to read.

Goodreads announced this week that it is giving back to the community.  It will donate books to First Book, a non-profit literacy program, and it wants Goodreads members to show how much they care.

You can help by adding the book A Visit from the Goon Squad to your bookshelf on Goodreads. It’s promised to donate 1 thousand books to First Book for every 10,000 members who participate. Over 25 thousand members have already added the book, so Goodreads has promised to donate a minimum of 2,000 books.

First Book is dedicated to making sure that all children in the US and Canada have access to books. It works with schools and community programs in low-income communities to bring children a steady supply of new books.

via Goodreads

image by Librarian In Black