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Comment by tmcw | Hacker News Reader

This missed the biggest technical moat by a mile: data.

Book data is scarce and expensive. Goodreads gets it for free because of Amazon, Amazon gets it subsidized because of Amazon's chokehold on book publishing. Any Goodreads competitor needs to license paid data and sort through the duds and the duplicates, and struggle to match up book with only ASINs that are on Amazon Kindles and nowhere else.

And Kindle integration. When you finish a book on a Kindle, it asks you to review it on Goodreads. If you want to add an option to review it on $otherstartup website, your best bet is a supreme court antitrust case.

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The metadata itself is not a moat. ISBN APIs allow for easy access to primary data attributes of a book.

The social data that Goodreads aggregates is definitely a moat, because it powers their SEO efforts further.

kindle integration.

Which APIs? Worldcat, with decent data but paid licensing and lots of dirty data? Amazon’s, which they’ll shut down if you build a competitor? Try finding an API that gives you high-quality book cover images, too. And the ability to retain results.

I actually turned off the Kindle integration because it was horribly broken. Books would get marked read as soon as they were opened, and then it was a nightmare of navigating through the UI to try to edit the dates when you read a book.

Overall, I like Goodreads, but the Kindle integration is not a selling point in my experience.

The Amazon takeover ruined it for me. It followed the now-familiar 'geeks, mops, and sociopaths' trajectory from there.[]

[] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Instead of reviews and recommendations from other bibliophiles, it's filled with mass-market Amazon-quality reviews.

The fantasy genre there became dominated by romance for a while, with no ability for me to filter down based on criteria like 'Ignore ratings and reviews from anyone who gave Twilight a 4+ star review'.

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