Reading Alone, Together

I love Goodreads. I’ve been using the site for years – maybe five or more – to track my reading, which means I have lists of books I read, reviewed, studied, or taught that I can refer to easily. And I’ve used the site to find new books to read.

Goodreads got even more successful in 2013 after being bought by Amazon, and The Atlantic has an interview with the founders:

. . . Goodreads has built, in my opinion, an amazing social ecosystem where people are finding books and discussing them. People have been reading books and then going to discuss them with friends with book clubs, you know, for as long as books have existed. That’s kind of what you do.

So how do we take those two experiences, which are different experiences—you want to read books alone, you want to discuss them with other people—and put them not necessarily together? I don’t think you want to be discussing while you’re reading, but you want to make it easy to get from reading to discussing. You want to make it one seamless experience so that people can get more out of the book. That’s how we’re trying to think about what we might build in the future with Kindle integration. But it’s important to also point out that that’s just for Kindle readers, and Goodreads is for all readers.

Read the whole thing here.