Susan Meraki's Blog - Posts Tagged "goodreads"
Why Goodreads is a Social Medium that Won't Go Away
I normally blog
here
for my semi-weekly blogs - on Tuesdays and Thursdays. However, I felt it apropos to shift the topic a little and focus on Goodreads for today's entry.
Social media has been around as long as the Internet has been a part of our lives - beginning with "apps" such as BBS and simple email. As time marched on, new offerings were made including the innovative AOL chat and MySpace; two offerings that are barely relevant anymore. Then came YouTube, Facebook, and so on. Will these survive? Will Goodreads survive? Does anyone remember Netscape? It was THE way to get to Internet leading up to the dot com boom.
Goodreads was recently bought out by Amazon.com so chances are that some form of it will survive as long as Amazon.com will. The reasons for its survival (and thrive) is that it reaches out to a community of people who have existed for as long as there was a written language. I'm talking about readers.
More specifically, Goodreads allows readers to have a great deal of latitude of what they want from the experience. The shelves are a great example of this. You want to make up your own genre? Do it. Don't let a bookstore tell you what genre it is. Don't let anyone tell you what it is.
The community is growing and, as such, experiences growing pains - it's hard to pick the right community forum to belong, for example. From the outside, it may appear that Goodreads could go the way of MySpace and become irrelevant; its irrelevance was driven by the lack of rules that it imparted on its users. Conversely, Facebook made an easy-to-use interface... it's easy-to-use because it has lots of rules and constraints. With Goodreads' flexibility will it, too, go the way of MySpace? At this rate, no. Goodreads has a ton of capabilities and I would have the safe guess that not all readers use even half of them.
My experience with Goodreads has been a few years old. Admittedly, I only went to Goodreads as a visitor so I could see what was going on in the world of literature WITHOUT being told what I should read by publishers or retailers. Here readers have control. I didn't create a profile because I wanted to avoid the "yet another username and password" to remember. Every website you go to requires this - ugh. Furthermore my day job and day-to-day life responsibilities leave me with little spare time to read. How many of you have a stack of 12 books on your nightstand (or ebook)?
Goodreads will survive and thrive because it puts a great deal of power into the hands of the readers - not authors and not even publishers. Every forum I go to calls out authors specifically: Do not spam. Do not advertise. Use discussion X to show your stuff. In a world in which publishers do next to nothing in terms of advertising, almost all of it is left to the authors (with very few exceptions).
There is a fixed number of messages I can send to readers every day that aren't "friends" - I only write non-friends to give them a heads-up about a giveaway shipment. I love this feature because it really shows that this is a guarded community. We are here to find good books. We are here to read good books. Yes, every writer has the next mega-seller but let the readers decide.
Goodreads will thrive because of the power it gives readers in a form that's easy to use. It allows readers to be readers without be heckled by authors trying to push books down their throats. It's not perfect and there's no telling what Amazon.com will ultimately do to Goodreads, but I'm glad it's here. At the very least, it will serve as the gold standard for the reading community.
Social media has been around as long as the Internet has been a part of our lives - beginning with "apps" such as BBS and simple email. As time marched on, new offerings were made including the innovative AOL chat and MySpace; two offerings that are barely relevant anymore. Then came YouTube, Facebook, and so on. Will these survive? Will Goodreads survive? Does anyone remember Netscape? It was THE way to get to Internet leading up to the dot com boom.
Goodreads was recently bought out by Amazon.com so chances are that some form of it will survive as long as Amazon.com will. The reasons for its survival (and thrive) is that it reaches out to a community of people who have existed for as long as there was a written language. I'm talking about readers.
More specifically, Goodreads allows readers to have a great deal of latitude of what they want from the experience. The shelves are a great example of this. You want to make up your own genre? Do it. Don't let a bookstore tell you what genre it is. Don't let anyone tell you what it is.
The community is growing and, as such, experiences growing pains - it's hard to pick the right community forum to belong, for example. From the outside, it may appear that Goodreads could go the way of MySpace and become irrelevant; its irrelevance was driven by the lack of rules that it imparted on its users. Conversely, Facebook made an easy-to-use interface... it's easy-to-use because it has lots of rules and constraints. With Goodreads' flexibility will it, too, go the way of MySpace? At this rate, no. Goodreads has a ton of capabilities and I would have the safe guess that not all readers use even half of them.
My experience with Goodreads has been a few years old. Admittedly, I only went to Goodreads as a visitor so I could see what was going on in the world of literature WITHOUT being told what I should read by publishers or retailers. Here readers have control. I didn't create a profile because I wanted to avoid the "yet another username and password" to remember. Every website you go to requires this - ugh. Furthermore my day job and day-to-day life responsibilities leave me with little spare time to read. How many of you have a stack of 12 books on your nightstand (or ebook)?
Goodreads will survive and thrive because it puts a great deal of power into the hands of the readers - not authors and not even publishers. Every forum I go to calls out authors specifically: Do not spam. Do not advertise. Use discussion X to show your stuff. In a world in which publishers do next to nothing in terms of advertising, almost all of it is left to the authors (with very few exceptions).
There is a fixed number of messages I can send to readers every day that aren't "friends" - I only write non-friends to give them a heads-up about a giveaway shipment. I love this feature because it really shows that this is a guarded community. We are here to find good books. We are here to read good books. Yes, every writer has the next mega-seller but let the readers decide.
Goodreads will thrive because of the power it gives readers in a form that's easy to use. It allows readers to be readers without be heckled by authors trying to push books down their throats. It's not perfect and there's no telling what Amazon.com will ultimately do to Goodreads, but I'm glad it's here. At the very least, it will serve as the gold standard for the reading community.
