Goodreads Book Descriptions are Disappearing. Or Not. Or Something.
Passive Guy has always had a hate/hate relationship with Goodreads, which is surely the goofiest bulletin board he’s ever dealt with. He’s had regular encounters over the years while trying to help Mrs. PG get problems with her author page resolved and is always in a bad mood afterwards.
The latest chapter is a strangely ambiguous announcement that some book descriptions will be disappearing. Users are receiving orphaned books notifications and being told they need to rescue their books.
From Goodreads:
On January 30, Goodreads will no longer display book information that comes from Amazon.
Amazon’s data has been great for us for many years, but the terms that come with it have gotten more and more restrictive, and we were finally forced to come to the conclusion that moving to other datasources will be better for Goodreads and our members in so many ways that we had to do it. It may be a little painful, but our aim is to make it as seamless as possible for all our members.
Amazon data that we will stop using includes data such as titles, author names, page counts, and publication dates. For the vast majority of book editions, we are currently importing this data from other sources. Once the imports are done, those few remaining editions for which we haven’t found an alternative source of information will be removed from Goodreads.
Member ratings, reviews, and bookshelves are safe, but your data may be moved to a different edition of the book. If we can’t find a matching edition, then your review will be attached to a book with no title or author. But the good news is that there’s a way you can help.
. . . .
Early next week, we will be importing a database of 14 million ISBNs from a new source, so many of the books that seem to need rescue today may not actually be in jeopardy. We won’t know until we import this new data source. So please don’t spend a lot of time rescuing books—we don’t want you to do unnecessary work. What we really need is for everyone to try rescuing a few books to see if the tools are working as we hoped. That way, once next week rolls around, we’ll be ready to get down to the business or rescuing the books that actually are in jeopardy.
. . . .
Update: There have been many questions about Kindle Editions and books in the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) program. As these editions are unique to Amazon, there are no alternative data sources. We anticipate keeping these, and will bend over backwards for all our authors who publish via Kindle to make sure their readers on Goodreads have a smooth transition.
Link to the rest at Goodreads and thanks to Abel for the tip.
One commenter posted the following:
Is the rescue list specific to each user, and taken from their shelves? Because mine is over 1000! I’m concerned, because I have improved many, many listings, over the years, whose data may have originally come from amazon, but which I augmented. Specifically, with better images, and descriptions. Does this mean all this additional content will be lost, if the original info came from amazon, and it isn’t rescued?
PG is in a bad mood because he had to spend almost 5 minutes on Goodreads to get the information for this post. He will note the Goodreads orphan warning was dated January 20, so the unpaid worker bees who make Goodreads work (sort of) have 10 days to figure out what is going on before their books may or may not be zapped.
But, of course, according to Goodreads, it’s all Amazon’s fault.
Is PG the only one who is reminded of Compuserve in the 1980′s whenever he goes to Goodreads? (If you weren’t around in the 1980′s, you don’t need to answer this question.)
Compu-what?
A long-defunct pre-web bulletin board service that attracted lots of techies during the DOS age, Livia. It was actually a better technical platform than Goodreads
Alas, I do actually remember compuserve, though not clearly. I’m old enough to have used AOL though, and Prodigy.
Though I messed around some with Prodigy, my real love was ProStar, regional BBS in Western Washington. Ah, the memories…
Ah, Prodigy. Back when it was all f’ing MAGIC. I could exchange cross stitch patterns with people in OTHER COUNTRIES!! Thank you for the memories.
Intuitive, it is not. Busy, busy, busy. Still, I’ve gotten some good info from the author–especially indie author–threads. And it can be fun to read some of the more honest reviews by articulate and perceptive readers who have no intention of writing books themselves, clearly!
They’re no-holds-barred mean most of time. I don’t really think of them as being honest because often you’ll find a scorching review of a piece of genre fiction being picked apart by someone who doesn’t seem to be interested in the genre. It’s like they want to feel good about themselves by making fun of others that they feel superior to.
I find goodreads reviews to be more honest (ie, less prone to gaming than Amazon.) Some are mean, but most books that I browse average around 4 star ratings.
Folks, this post wasn’t about reviews on Goodreads. How about sticking to the subject?
Go be a post nazi elsewhere.
Really? Did you read the post?
It begins by discussing PG’s hate/hate relationship with GR, or did I just imagine that?
Whoa, Catana, some of the best discussions come from free-ranging comments — both on this blog and elsewhere. You are free to not read the threaded comments that don’t interest you, of course…
I agree, Josh. Someone got the idea for the movie “Mean Girls” after getting their book reviewed there.
There’s been a study done in Australia about people who do these bad reviews and start flame wars because it’s becoming a real problem for businesses. The brain behaves exactly as if the person was drunk. They were already called trolls, so I dubbed them drunk trolls. Made a sign to go along with the concept.
It’s true. GR is a haven for trolls.
“Is PG the only one who is reminded of Compuserve in the 1980′s whenever he goes to Goodreads?”
P.G.
Goodreads is a LOT cheaper. My costuserve account regularly used to thrash me for $200 a month.
Back in the day…..these modern babies with their fancy phones and tablets don’t know they’re born:)
brendan
You are correct about the bills, Brendan. CS was a long-distance call for me long before free minutes, etc.
I’m trying to remember the little scripting program that automated rapid downloads from the forums to allow you to browse them offline. It saved me a fortune.
Compuserve, LOL
If only somebody decent like Amazon would get it over with and buy Goodreads, just God forbid, not a NY publishing “consortium”.
How many AOL disks did you get on a weekly basis? -Steve
Oh the AOL discs! I used them as coasters… although for a little while there they were sending the discs in these CD sized aluminum tins. those were pretty sweet and I still have a couple of them. But the discs were still made coasters.
I do not bemoan the loss of the old AOL. The most clueless people I ever had to deal with online all seemed to have AOL addresses.
Me too. /AOL
How very bizarre. I wonder what those “restrictions” are that Amazon’s imposing. After the Amazon info is gone, maybe the site should be renamed Semi-Goodreads.
I do not use GoodReads for the reviews. I’m one of those people who reads reviews only after finishing a book. Reviews often reveal too much, spoiling the reading experience. However, I visit Goodreads multiple times per day (just as I come to this blog throughout the day) because it hosts a discussion group I love (check out Robust). An Irish lad named Andre Jute started it and the first and only rule was that anything and everything can be posted. Several indie authors hang out there, specializing in off-topic posts that can go just about anywhere.
Compuserve? Egads, that takes me back a ways. Not that I’m old enough to remember it, of course…
You must have used Compuserve in pre-school, Patricia.
No, it was a little before that. I had to take breaks from my reading every so often to get my diaper changed.
Actually, I remember when Compuserve was delivered on stone tablets.
I’d guess the restriction is probably that amazon wants them only to link to amazon when someone wants to actually buy the book.
As for reviews as spoilers, I’m the opposite. Frequently the blurb or description the publisher or author has provided fails to tell me enough about what the actual book is about. Often it’s a users review that gives me the hints that the book will either be the sort of thing I like, or let me know that it includes any number of my pet peeves. Whether the review is positive or negative is irrelevant. 5 star reviews have killed sales and 1 star reviews have made them on a fairly regular basis.
OMFG. Has Goodreads gone insane? What are they thinking doing this? Oh well, it’s good for me as I have a HATE HATE HATE relationship with Goodreads and I want all my titles off that stupid ass site forever and ever. So this is a WIN for me!
I agree with you. I think this will hurt GR in a big way. I like what someone put – we’ll call it Semi-Goodreads from now on.
Is there a downside to having your books listed there? If you don’t like it can’t you just ignore it? (Has never poked around on goodreads.)
I dallied with a website once (that never launched) that, like Goodreads, would rely on importing metadata from external sources. I did a lot of work with Amazon and Google Books’ APIs, but ultimately decided to drop Amazon for Google exclusively because of the restrictive terms of use. For example, I was in no way, shape or form to store the data from Amazon on my own servers, and if Amazon notified me that the publisher had removed the information from /their/ website, I must immediately remove it from /mine/. It was just too big of a headache to figure out how to protect my data from being suddenly yanked away from me and my users (and of course, there was also the requirement that I link to the Amazon product page whenever I used their info, which is what drove the library I worked for to seek other sources for their site as well).
So to me, this isn’t that shocking at all. It’s exactly what I feared what would happen when I abandoned my own project. It largely /is/ Amazon’s fault, though it was also the fault of the Goodreads owners for not seeing the writing on the wall (or the ToS).
Thank you. Your post helps me see why GoodReads is doing this. I thought Amazon would be grateful for any and all links to their site. The info about the restrictions is entirely new to me.
Since this move on GoodRead’s part seems rather sudden and will be handled post haste, I wonder if there was a recent dust-up between Amazon and them.
Thanks for this comment. I was curious about the underlying API, and thought this might be the case.
Very interesting, T.K., thanks for sharing.
This isn’t really surprising. Companies that maintain databases like Amazon get their bread and butter from its use. Which means they have to control things like that with their contract; otherwise there’s no way to prevent people from ripping the whole thing and using it for themselves. (Well, you still can, but this way they can sue you…) At the very least it’s actually reasonable for them to expect a link back. It’s annoying, but data collation isn’t free or cheap.
I hope to goodness they don’t end up with the info source that eBay used when destroying Half.com. You had to compare everything to make sure you were listing the right edition of the right book and frequently the information was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Compuserve– that takes me back although Prodigy was the first service I learned to navigate with an competency. It was that flaming 1200 baud modem.
If I were nearly as old as my birth certificate says I am, I would remember Prodigy, too. And I’d recall when Prodigy introduced Navigator, a ship that would sail into the Wide World Web. I’d also recall how that Navigator icon twirled and twirled while it tried to connect — and how little there seemed to be on the WWW once you got there. It was a toy without instructions on how to play with it.
Careful, we’ll frighten the children.
Not to defend Goodreads here (their site really does suck), but Amazon has gotten more and more restrictive with their API at every turn. I experienced this firsthand while coding Pauper’s. They are pretty good about giving you time to adjust before an API change, but anytime there is a change, you can bet it’s not going to be good for you.
Mostly it’s just removing more and more meta-data and requiring you to send them to Amazon to get it instead. First it was reviews, then it was search results, next it’ll be price or something else. Soon you’ll be able to just get the title and author and an Amazon link back.
When you dance with the devil, he picks the tune.
One more important datapoint. Thanks, Damon.
Goodreads is a lot easier to use than CI$ ever was in my opinion. I suppose this is a YMMV thing. I was more into GEnie, anyway.
Goodreads has made a deal with Ingram to use their data, so the number of books actually needing rescue went way down. It’s really not as much of a mushroom cloud as some folks around the net are making it out to be.
Angie
Ah, good to know. I input all my data for my books at Goodreads myself, but I have author friends who went into conniptions over this. Glad it’s not quite so dire~
I wonder what other source Goodreads will use; Google’s metadata (at least used to be) notoriously bad.
I had a Compuserve account back in the day, and probably if I searched long enough, I could even find the numeric user id (7 octal digits, so user friendly!). Fortunately, I had access to the Arpanet and Usenet back then, so I seldom had to resort to Compuserve.
I must be even older than Sierra: I remember the ARPAnet, and its predecessor that the Pentagon let favoured businesses use. (We got in because our psych lab saved a 100 naval pilots’ lives a year by developing a dayglo yellow line to paint across the fat end of aircraft carriers. It saved the larger business of which the psych lab was a minuscule sub-division 600K a year in comms costs. All hail the American taxpayer…)
Those who sup with the devil need long spoon. Every time I see Amazon in operation, and most notably with the recent exclusive Select program and now this business with Goodreads, which is a competitive move (Amazon owns 40% of Goodreads competitor LibraryThing, and it owns Shelfari, which is a sub-Goodreads clone), I wonder about people who commit their entire future to as callous a partner as Amazon, as most indies have done.
I wonder if Selfari (Amazon’s version of GoodReads) will make a big subscriber push?
That’s probably the real story here.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
Like the recent dustup between CreateSpace and Lightning Source.
Where’s our insider info when we need it! And, hm, is *that* why CreateSpace dropped the ‘pay-for-premium’ stuff? Having just ponied up in December, I was a little miffed about that, I have to say~
Agreed, Anthea. I was similarly ticked off.
Also, I think some of the bookstores in the CreateSpace Expanded Distribution network were underpricing some of Mrs. PG’s books on Amazon. It was doubly aggravating to have them pay so little in royalties compared to Amazon sales, but piggy-backing on the work we did to make the Amazon listings look good.
I turned off Expanded Distribution to see if that makes them go away.
Yes, apparently the undercutting issue is all too common. I see it with my POD YA Fantasy, but I console myself that most people will buy from Amazon and bundle purchases in order to get free shipping (if they’re not Prime members already). It does irritate me, however, that B&N is selling the title for $3 *under* the MSRP, while I get such a teensy little squidge of royalty. CreateSpace is squeezing authors here, if there’s room for the retailer to discount that much but I still only get .74 cents in royalties for a $12.99 book. I’m hoping they rethink the way they do expanded distribution, and I’d love to hear how pulling Mrs. PG’s books from that arena goes.
Dear PG,
1. I did get that notice regarding my KDP published book, then the notice disappeared and I couldn’t get anyone at GR to reply to an email as to what was going on, so thanks for the clarification (or at least for trying to clarify what may be perpetually opaque.)
2. Not only do I remember Compuserve, I remember the dulcet tones of my 12 baud modem in handshake mode, way back when I thought CS was ‘way cool.’
3. As an un-recovered and un-repentant control freak, I miss the simplicity of DOS and the ability to craft a batch file and know exactly what the @#$% was going on, rather than having to accept the evil magic of Windows writing to myriad hidden files.
But I guess that ship has sailed. Anyway thanks again for the info on the GR thing.
in the 1980′s whenever he goes to Goodreads? (If you weren’t around in the 1980′s, you don’t need to answer this question.)
I still use DOS sometimes. Command line interfaces are a wonderful thing.
[...] 3: There’s a nice thread over on The Passive Voice’s post about [...]
PG,
Sorry, I left some un-deleted text in my previous message.
“in the 1980′s whenever he goes to Goodreads? (If you weren’t around in the 1980′s, you don’t need to answer this question.)”
Which actually raises another question. Any chance on implementing a ‘preview’ function on your comments for us perpetually bunglers? Or, failing that, a way to recall/edit a posted comment. Just a thought.
R.E. – I’m trying to find a good WordPress plug-in that will allow for editing and more control over comments, but haven’t found one yet. The one that seemed to work well for a few weeks last autumn has gone wonky.
Dang! Make that ‘perpetual’ bunglers.
PG has used an editing widget for the comments in the past, but it started malfunctioning recently, so he removed it. I’m sure he’s looking for another good one, in all his spare time…
Anthea,
Thanks, I missed that. I guess I’ll just have to be a better proofreader. Always a challenge.
Any suggestions for WordPress plug-ins that work would be appreciated.
OK! In the interests of fairness, I have to say that seconds after hurling the above rock at GR for non-response, I received a very nice response from GR informing me my book was ‘safe.’
Hmm! Then again, maybe the GR folks are reading PV comments.
Well, maybe that means the titles I’ve retired will finally fall off of Goodreads. So that would be a slight win.
So at the moment, all my self-published ebooks are short stories, and only available on Amazon because of my personal issues with B&N and Smashwords.
There goes my author presence on Goodreads, except for a handful of out-of-print paper titles.
Looks like I’m going back to Shelfari. Ah, well…
Most likely not. (That is, about your short stories. Up to you whether you leave GR as an author.
)
Latest I heard was that they expect to get data on pretty much everything except perhaps some really obscure foreign titles, and they’re working on those.
Angie
Yeah, they’re using Ingram and the Library of Congress for starters, and hoping to get more international sources (as well as individual data donors, as usual).
All this hatred for Goodreads fascinates me. I’m very fond of the site. It’s pretty much the best large book-focused community on the web. It isn’t author-focused, it’s true, but I think that’s part of what makes it so good.
I’m actually rather fond of their tools. I’ve never done a giveaway, but I hear good things about the marketing value of those. I’ve done an author Q&A, which was fun.
I agree — Goodreads is a great site. Yes, there are jerks there, but any site with that many users is going to have a lot of jerks. It’s not like GR is at all special in that regard. It’s easy (or I’ve found it so) to find a good community of folks in a special interest group or two, follow people you like and unfollow people who turn out to be jerks, and have a great time. The hardest part is only spending as much time as I have to spend; it could easily be a major timesink.
Angie
My experiences with Goodreads have been positive, as both a reader AND an author. But then, I’m not a member of any groups, and I keep a pretty low profile.
I’m obviously in the minority because Goodreads gets lots of traffic, but its interface and general design have driven me crazy many times while I was trying to do something simple for Mrs. PG as an author.
I’ve definitely seen the complaints about the UI; it isn’t something I’ve had trouble with but trying to direct other people to various special features can be a nightmare. I think there must be something about book-focused sites…
I have problems with some of their UI and navigation. I’m fairly certain there are numerous pages on the site which can only be reached on alternate tuesdays while chanting Paradise Lost backwards upside down underwater.
I’ve had overall positive experiences with Goodreads as well. There are a couple of irritating things about their design, but having tried GR, Shelfari and Librarything, I vastly prefer Goodreads.
Compuserve? Did someone mention CompuServe? That’s an excuse to say that one of my first programming jobs involved using Microsoft Access (v1.1) to talk to CrossTalk via NetDDE and invoke a script to automatically connect to CompuServe, download some compressed binary data, and then decode the data into the Access database. If there is anyone left alive who understands that sentence, they would be really impressed. Ah, the bad old days…
From the Mac bad old days, Clarus the Dogcow and Font DA/Mover and 28.8 was a rippin’ fast connection… LOL
Good god, I’m feeling *old* from a lifetime ago. Explained to the grandson last week about b/w television without recording features, pre-VHS tape even.
))
William, ah yes, CrossTalk. I remember it well. And I did understand that sentence, though I found the fact that it made sense depressing rather than impressing.
.
And SL. If you ever need a ‘show and tell’ for your grandson, I think I still have an old B&W portable (a relative term considering the equipment we’re discussing) in the attic. Bring him around and I’ll rig it down with the chain fall.
I had an Olivetti portable typewriter in front of a b/w TV in the activity center of my 4th grade class in 1991. Spent a week frustrating kids who wanted to use the “computer” by telling them if they could get it to work they could use it. Once they found out what the Olivetti really was, they were fascinated by a machine that would print the letters they typed as they typed them. Had a sign-up sheet for free time. They were also under the impression I invented the slide rule …
“Show and tell”? In 1991 I put an Olivetti portable typewriter in front of a b/w TV in the activity center of my 4th grade class. Spent a week frustrating kids who wanted to use the “computer” by telling them if they could get it to work they could use it. Once they found out what the Olivetti really was, they were fascinated by a machine that would print the letters they typed as they typed them. Had a sign-up sheet for free time.
They were also under the impression I invented the slide rule …
Epson PX8/Paris with 150 baud cup-coupler acoustic modem (upgraded from a 75 baud modem…). I remember standing in a pay phone booth in Anchorage, trying to download a novel to my publishers in London. It ended up being only marginally cheaper than chartering a transatlantic jet…
I agree about the site being the most difficult around.
I’ve copied a number of tutorials purporting to be guide to the “best way to get the most out of Goodreads” and they haven’t helped me one, single bit.
No matter how hard I try, I’ve yet to figure out how to make it work for me and even to become involved in helpful discussions.
I sorta scan it but count on my old favorites; Absolute Write Water Cooler and Query Tracker.net.
Wow, didn’t know GR was a volatile issue for PG, but have yet to deal with GR myself as an author so what do I know.
As for Compuserve…yes, I remember trying to buy a shiny new “PS2″ (IBM…NOT Playstation) box to go with a second hand monitor and stack of fresh, blank 3.5 floppy’s I had and NOT being able to. The store was that useless.
Lol…that reference is low man, just low!
Writing Trip
@Andrea, OMG, don’t get me started on LibraryThing eBook import, especially Kindle only titles.
Thinking about this for a moment, anyone garnering a big chunk of Amazon Affiliate $$ will likely find a contract dispute on the horizon. Play sterile lab clean or face the slime. Once “big enough”, most every industry & company is in the Bezos cross hairs.
I wonder why I didn’t get the notice from them. I have to admit Goodreads is on my list of places to start hanging out. I can’t seem to find the time to work another platform and GR always seems to be more difficult than it needs to be.
I guess if I have to go in and fix everything after they are done with the divorce from the most popular and biggest market for ebooks, I’ll have to take sides.
[...] Goodreads Book Descriptions are Disappearing. Or Not. Or Something. [...]
I didn’t have a computer in the days of Compuserv. At that time they were an expensive status symbol of little real use – like 3D TV today – and I was an elementary school teacher, unable to afford anything related to “expensive” or “status.” My first computer was a Mac, since that’s the brand my school district went with in 1989, and I was a member of eWorld for its entire life, which I think was a comparable experience.
I’d never paid attention to Goodreads before, so I went and checked them out. They say they reach millions of readers. I’d like to have millions of readers so I took the time to register as an author. I’ll find out if any of my books need to be rescued as soon as they’ve reviewed my application.