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Comment by picardo | Hacker News Reader

It's not mentioned in the article but Amazon had disabled their affiliate link program for Goodreads ahead of this announcement, which cut off a major source of their revenue for them, and forced them to sell. They had no choice.

The strategic reason for Amazon is obvious. As someone else mentioned, Amazon doesn't want Goodreads data to be used to add value to their competitors' offerings.

Speaking as a developer who tried to build on top of Goodreads API, I also want to add that this was a long time coming. The API had been neglected for some time. And some of the most interesting datasets weren't even made available through the API.

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> Amazon doesn't want Goodreads data to be used to add value to their competitors'

This is it exactly. Goodreads was/is the best/largest source of information on books available online.

See also WorldCat:

> WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of 17,900 libraries in 123 countries and territories[4] that participate in the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc.[5] The subscribing member libraries collectively maintain WorldCat's database, the world's largest bibliographic database.[6]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldCat

* https://www.worldcat.org

that would be great, if it had an open API

It is useless without API

Also, user review, lists and tagging/bookshelves. Just massive data

Open Library looks like it has a decent API: https://openlibrary.org/developers/api

Hopefully the Justice department can use this as fodder for a potential breakup. It clearly demonstrates how monopolies kill competition, not by competing but by buying and extinguishing.

Looks like a by the book anti competitive behavior.

Isn’t that what all the big tech acquisitions have been in the last few decades?

Buy it so no one else can have it or buy it so you can shut it down.

It's not illegal though unless you can prove it harmed the consumers.

Apparently Amazon’s Kindle lost the ability to share progress on Goodreads in the last week as well.

I guess the writings on the wall...

The end of an era. Sad to see. First IMDB and now GoodReads. So much for open data. Thanks for the bait and switch. Good thing we trusted them with our data.

Welp, time to start a better book catalog site with threaded discussions that eBook page turns can be synced with.

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