Goodreads is a social cataloging website from the United States, run by Goodreads, Inc., which is a company owned by Amazon. Users can search for books, notes, quotes, and reviews on the site. They can also add books to the database to help create library catalogs and reading lists. Users can make their own groups for book recommendations, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. The website’s offices are in San Francisco.

Goodreads was started in December 2006 and launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler. In December 2007, the site had 650,000 members, and 10 million books had been added. By July 2012, the site had 10 million members, 20 million monthly visitors, and 30 employees. On March 28, 2013, Amazon announced it would buy Goodreads. By July 23, 2013, Goodreads reported it had 20 million members.

By September 2023, the site had more than 150 million members.

History

Goodreads was created by Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler. They both studied at Stanford University, where Otis studied engineering and Elizabeth studied English. After college, Otis worked as a programmer for online businesses, including dating websites, while Elizabeth worked as a journalist. Both grew up in California. Otis is a descendant of Otis Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times.

Goodreads was founded in 2006. The idea began when Otis looked at his friend’s bookshelf and wanted to recreate the experience of browsing books. He aimed to create a place where people could share and review books they read.

Goodreads sought to solve the “discoverability problem” in the digital age by offering a platform where readers could find, discuss, and share books. It used user reviews, recommendations, and community features to help people find books they might enjoy.

Before gaining popularity, Otis and Elizabeth grew the platform through word of mouth, reaching 800 users. Later, media outlets like Mashable helped increase its visibility. During its first year, the company operated without formal funding. In December 2007, it received $750,000 from angel investors, which supported the company until 2009, when it received $2 million from True Ventures.

In October 2010, Goodreads opened its application programming interface (API), allowing developers to access its book ratings and titles.

In 2011, Goodreads acquired Discovereads, a book recommendation tool that uses machine learning algorithms to suggest books based on users’ past preferences. After a user rated 20 books on a five-star scale, the site began making recommendations. Otis believed this system would be better than Amazon’s, which included books users had browsed or received as gifts. That year, Goodreads introduced an algorithm to suggest books to users and had over five million members. A writer for The New Yorker noted that the algorithm was not perfect, as the number of books needed for accurate recommendations is so large that users’ preferences might change before a complete system is built.

By 2012, membership was required but free. In October 2012, Goodreads announced it had 11 million members, 395 million books cataloged, and over 20,000 book clubs created by users. A month later, membership reached 12 million, doubling in one year.

In March 2013, Amazon agreed to buy Goodreads for an undisclosed amount in the second quarter of 2013. Amazon had previously purchased Shelfari in 2008, and the Goodreads acquisition surprised the book industry. The Authors Guild called the move a “truly devastating act of vertical integration” and said Amazon’s control over online bookselling was nearly unstoppable. Reactions from Goodreads users, who numbered 16 million at the time, were mixed. Otis Chandler stated that his management team would stay to protect the reviewing process. He continued running Goodreads until 2019. The New York Times noted that Goodreads had a more trustworthy reviewing system than Amazon’s at the time of the acquisition. The paper also said that Goodreads was a competitor to Amazon for book discovery and that the deal strengthened Amazon’s power to influence which authors received attention.

In September 2013, Goodreads announced it would delete reviews that threatened authors or focused on authors’ behavior rather than the books themselves. As of April 2020, the site’s guidelines still stated that such reviews would be removed.

In January 2016, Amazon announced it would shut down Shelfari in favor of Goodreads, effective March 16, 2016. Users could export their data and transfer accounts. In April 2016, Goodreads reported over 50 million user reviews had been posted.

In 2023, Jane Friedman found six books listed on Amazon and Goodreads that she believed were written using AI-generated models and falsely used her name. Amazon and Goodreads refused to remove the books until her complaints went viral on social media.

Features

On the Goodreads website, users can add books to their personal bookshelves, rate and review books, see what their friends and authors are reading, join discussion groups, and get book suggestions based on their past reviews. After adding friends to their profile, users can view their friends' bookshelves and reviews and leave comments on their pages. Goodreads uses a rating system from one to five stars, and users can write a review to go with their rating. The site provides default bookshelves—such as "read," "currently-reading," and "to-read"—and allows users to create custom shelves to organize their books.

A popular activity on the site is the "reading challenge," where users set a goal to read a certain number of books in a year and track their progress. Studies show that these challenges help people read more in their free time.

Users can preview books on the website using Kindle Cloud Reader or Audible. Goodreads also offers quizzes, trivia, book lists, and free giveaways. Members can receive a regular newsletter with updates on new books, author interviews, and poetry. If a user has written a book, it can be linked on their author profile, which also includes a blog. Goodreads also organizes offline events, such as in-person book exchanges and "literary pub crawls."

Goodreads provides a "My Year in Books" report that shows users how many books and pages they read, the average length of their books, and their average ratings. This tradition, started by Fionnuala Lirsdottir in 2014, helps users reflect on their reading habits.

The website allows readers to interact with authors through interviews, giveaways, blogs, and profile information. There is a special section for authors with tips on promoting their books on Goodreads.com to reach more readers. By 2011, 17,000 authors, including James Patterson and Margaret Atwood, used Goodreads to advertise their work.

Users can add each other as "friends" to share reviews, recommendations, and messages.

Goodreads is connected to social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Linking a Goodreads account to a social media account allows users to import contacts, expanding their "Friends" list on Goodreads. Settings also let users share updates from Goodreads directly to their social media accounts, such as telling friends what they are reading or how they rated a book.

The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (version 2) and Kindle Voyage have a feature that connects with Goodreads through a button in the user interface.

Catalog data

Book information was added using large amounts of data from many sources, both public and private. These sources included individual publishers, Ingram, Amazon (before 2012 and after 2013), WorldCat, and the Library of Congress.

Goodreads librarians work to improve book details on the website, such as editing book and author information and adding cover images. Members who have 50 books listed on their profiles can apply to become volunteer librarians. These librarians communicate and work together in the Goodreads Librarian Group.

User information is owned by Goodreads but can be accessed through an application programming interface, or API. This is different from similar projects like The Open Library, which share catalog and user data as open information. In December 2020, Goodreads stopped allowing API keys that were older than 30 days and announced it would no longer issue new API keys.

In January 2012, Goodreads changed from using Amazon’s public Product Advertising API to using Ingram, a book wholesaler. This decision was made because Amazon’s API rules were too strict, and combining data from Ingram, the Library of Congress, and other sources would be more flexible. Some users were worried that their reading records might be lost, but Goodreads had plans to protect data during the change, even for books that might be deleted, such as Kindle editions and self-published works on Amazon.

In May 2013, after Amazon acquired Goodreads, the website began using Amazon’s data again.

Competition and review fairness

In 2012, after a negative review of her book The Selection, author Kiera Cass asked her Twitter followers to remove the review from the front page of Goodreads' section for the book. This action caused public anger and led to discussions about how authors and reviewers interact on Goodreads. That same year, users criticized Goodreads for the way reviews were written and how easy it was to find them. Some users and websites claimed that certain reviewers were being mean or encouraging others to attack authors. In August 2012, Goodreads shared its review guidelines to fix these problems. Later, after Amazon bought Goodreads, the guidelines were changed to include removing any review that contained a personal attack or a comment unrelated to the book.

Goodreads Choice Awards

The Goodreads Choice Awards is an annual award program that began on Goodreads in 2009.

Winners are chosen by users who vote on books that Goodreads suggests or books users pick themselves, as long as the books were published in the same year. Most books that Goodreads suggests are written by authors who are confirmed by Goodreads. In the final vote, the top 10 books are selected in each of 20 different categories.

Criticism

Critics have pointed out that Goodreads has not improved its platform enough and has not kept it up to date, even though it is a major site for book reviews. For example, the way Goodreads suggests books to users has been called outdated. The StoryGraph was started in 2019 as a competitor to Goodreads.

Goodreads' system for people to write reviews is easier to misuse than other book-review websites. However, Goodreads is still the most popular site for book reviews. While Amazon does not let people post reviews for books that are not yet released, any user on Goodreads can rate or review a book before it comes out. Goodreads has also been criticized for not managing content carefully enough. Its system for checking reviews is done by people, and there is a long list of reviews that need to be checked.

Some reviews have been used to unfairly harm books, such as flooding a book with many negative one-star reviews before it is published. These harmful reviews have been called a form of online harassment and targeting of authors. For example, author Gretchen Felker-Martin's first horror novel, which is about a transgender woman, was flooded with negative reviews that she believed were part of an organized effort. Young adult fiction authors Keira Drake and Amélie Wen Zhao delayed the release of their fantasy novels after receiving a lot of criticism on Twitter and Goodreads from users who said their stories were racially insensitive. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, received many negative ratings on Goodreads for her not-yet-published novel The Snow Forest because some users disliked its setting in 1930s Russia. Cecilia Rabess, a Black author, received many negative reviews on Goodreads for her debut novel Everything's Fine, which is about a young Black woman who falls in love with a prejudiced white coworker at Goldman Sachs. Some of the people who left negative reviews had not even read the book. Scammers and cyberstalkers have also used threats of review bombing as part of schemes to extort money from authors.

In 2021, Goodreads said it takes quick action to remove users who break its rules and is working on technology to stop fake reviews and protect its community. However, authors have criticized the site for not managing content carefully enough. Fantasy novelist Rin Chupeco has said that authors from groups that face discrimination are often targeted, and that Goodreads only enforces its rules when reviews specifically attack authors who have large marketing teams.

Access to Goodreads has been blocked for some users in Iran, both by the Iranian government and by Amazon, which owns Goodreads.

In February 2010, the number of users in Iran who visited Goodreads dropped suddenly. This happened during a larger wave of internet restrictions in Iran, including the temporary blocking of Gmail. At the time, Goodreads said that over 114,000 Iranian users had added more than 714,000 books to their digital bookshelves. The platform praised Iranian users for discussing books and politics and said the restrictions were an attack on freedom of expression.

In June 2019, after the U.S. re-imposed sanctions on Iran, some Iranian users found their Goodreads accounts suspended. Emails from Goodreads said the action was due to "government sanctions and export control regulations." Writers, translators, and cultural figures, including Iranian authors Arash Azizi and Barbad Golshiri, said the move was a form of cultural censorship and not in line with free information sharing. The suspensions were widely discussed on social media. Goodreads does not offer financial or commercial services, and Iranian users mainly used it to review books and organize their reading.

The platform's 2010 statement, in which it criticized Iran for blocking access and said "books make no harm," was often mentioned in these discussions.

In late June 2025, Goodreads began removing accounts of Iranian users without warning. To regain access, users were asked to provide documents like a passport, proof of where they live, and proof of employment. In response, Iranian users started a public campaign to protest this action.