Andrew: And I know from looking at Goodreads, from looking at your profile on Goodreads, youre reading Think and Grow Rich an inspiration for me. For a lot of people, this is when things started to go downhill, and it's hard to argue against that. [42] By 2011, "seventeen thousand authors, including James Patterson and Margaret Atwood" used Goodreads to advertise.[4]. I had never read all these classics that I knew were really good. [41], The website facilitates reader interactions with authors through the interviews, giveaways, authors' blogs, and profile information. Interviewee: Yeah, I had basic stock options. I had never read Sherlock Holmes. If you're a premium member, you can save your likes. Thats intense. Ning has built like what? Otis Chandler (November 23, 1927 - February 27, 2006) was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times between 1960 and 1980, leading a large expansion of the newspaper and its ambitions. Interviewee: I think so. Net income in mil. And maybe every couple months Id empty my Amazon shopping cart. Research help from Claire Murashima. Goodreads is a "social cataloging" website founded in December 2006 and launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler, a software engineer, and entrepreneur, and Elizabeth Khuri. His soon-to-be-wife Elizabeth joined the project, and. ", "Goodreads Announces New Content Policy Now Deletes Reviews Which Mention Author Behavior", "Goodreads Reaches New Milestone: Fifty Million Reviews", "Reading Is Alive And Well At Social Reading Site Goodreads, Which Just Hit 10M Members", Amazon's next Kindle Paperwhite outed ahead of its official launch via Amazon's own leak, "Goodreads Librarians Group New Ingram Import", "Goodreads Librarians Group Adding New Books: Large Book Data Import (showing 1-50 of 472)", "Goodreads Librarians Group discussion Announcement: Goodreads to Import WorldCat & Library of Congress Data Tonight", "Goodreads Librarians Group Amazon is going away as a data source (showing 1-50 of 1,601)", "Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keys", "Goodreads shutters all APIs, breaking my open source app", "Importing your Goodreads & Accessing them with Open Library's APIs", "As Goodreads Ends Sourcing From Amazon, Users Fear Lost Books", "The Announcement You've All Been Waiting For", "How Amazon and Goodreads could lose their best readers", "Review Guidelines & Updated Author Guidelines", "Goodreads Modifies User Terms to Prevent Author Bullying, Reviewers Outraged", "Almost Everything About Goodreads Is Broken", "Goodreads Librarians Group - Issues with Quotes: Editing & Deleting My Quotes Showing 1-50 of 53", "Goodreads' growing pains: Attempt to curtail author bullying angers many users", "How Extortion Scams and Review Bombing Trolls Turned Goodreads Into Many Authors' Worst Nightmare", "Amazon pulls white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries alongside QAnon purge", List of mergers and acquisitions by Amazon. Okay, so thats where you came up with the idea. [1] After university Chandler initially worked as a programmer in on-line businesses,[11] including dating sites,[12] and Khuri Chandler as a journalist. Thank you everyone for watching, Im looking forward to your comments and Im looking forward to talking to, actually Im looking forward to your comments lets leave it there. Thats huge. So giving users the ability to do that means you can use it without your friends being on there. But thats the top two percent of authors that publishers are going to be helping them. Ive done several interviews here with entrepreneurs whose companies have failed and what they say often is I just gave everybody what they wanted, I was told I was supposed to go into the community, listen to the feature request, the product request that they had, and give them what they want, but then I ended up doing everything and my business lost its focus and I was too distracted. Hes on Facebook every day. Requires subscription and macOS 11.4 or higher. That they should see that the place doesnt feel as good, doesnt feel as comfortable without as many friends on it. And I think it has. You know you basically take fifteen questions and you learn about yourself a little bit and at the end you get typed into one type. You know, today we have Goodreads for books and we have Flickster for movies and we have Netflix and we have LastFM for music. As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. Monster Worldwide, the leading purveyor of online jobs, purchased the company in 2004. [25], In March 2013, Amazon made an agreement to acquire Goodreads in the second quarter of 2013 for an undisclosed sum. Andrew: How can you decide which ideas you listen to? So, you can kind of think of it as a virtual bookshelf. [71] Having false or invalid quotes removed can be a difficult process; problematically the quotes can be picked up by third-party websites like Pinterest and Instagram in the meantime, spreading invalid quotes attributed to the author even further, as Goodreads quotes bring a high amount of web traffic. Interviewee: What else did we do? If your name is Chris Anderson or Malcolm Gladwell theyre going to help you. You know for us we had a problem where Goodreads was about cataloging your books so you come in and youd add a bunch of books and youd say what you thought of them, and maybe youd go kind of nuts. This sparked public outrage and started a discussion on the relationship between authors and reviewers on Goodreads. In 2012, after a receiving a poor review on her novel The Selection, author Kiera Cass encouraged her Twitter followers to "knock [the review] off" the front page of Goodreads' section on the book. [69] According to Goodreads, transgender authors who published under a different name before coming out can contact the website directly to request exceptions, although there are no known or notable cases where trans authors have been given such choices. Talk to them a couple months later after the books been on the shelves for a while, they are so depressed they dont even want to talk about the book anymore. Should I go outsource to India or whatever? Im like no, just get a good engineer, get a smart guy out of college, give him a large piece of your company, make him your right hand man and go build something before you do anything and prove that it works. Goodreads is an American social cataloging website and a subsidiary of Amazon[1] that allows individuals to search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews. Work. Popular fantasy novelist Rin Chupeco has noted that authors from marginalized groups are often a target, and she also criticized the minimalist approach Goodreads takes to moderation, saying, "Goodreads only removes reviews that specifically target the author, but they do not do that for every book, eitherjust for the authors with big enough marketing and publicity teams to demand these removals." . Cause I was you know, Mechanical Engineer major, and these were two mechanical engineers that wanted to build a website for mechanical engineers, and it was basically gonna be an online resource for engineers to look up metallic chart properties or various formulas that you would normally find in your textbooks, but this was just gonna be easier. So its not keyword based like the other ones; its book genre based. [38], Goodreads users can read or listen to a preview of a book on the website using Kindle Cloud Reader and Audible. But people started to get burned out on those big generic sites. Andrew: How much are the business side of things? Interviewee: Right. So its kind of fun like that. [13] Chandler and Khuri both grew up in California. Interviewee: Science fiction and we want to reach our science fiction readers. I got that book for my Kindle, I love it. Hundreds of dollars? Since the second I found the Hardy Boys all the way through when I got to high school. Its only about a week and a half old, but its pretty exciting for us. Alright, how many members do you have now? Thank you everyone. So you know this idea is kind of built into it, and everywhere you go on the site youre kind of getting this reminder that theres stuff happening here and your friends are talking about it, and that just kind of helps get the concept across that hey, I should add friends. Because Goodreads allows reviews for any book record as soon as it first appears on Goodreads, and cannot verify that any account-holder in fact owns the book they claim to have read, there is no clear way to police this. One of the sites we built, that photo-sharing site I mentioned, was called ringo.com. [23] In October 2012, Goodreads announced it had grown to 11 million members with 395 million books cataloged and over 20,000 book clubs created by its users. Komunitas Goodreads sebenarnya adalah komunitas baca internasional yang digagas Otis Chandler pada tahun 2006. Eventually, it gained attention through the media such as Mashable and other various blogs. I think the trick is going back to what you said in the beginning, its having the rock star engineers. Mark (unclear) was here, and I asked him if hed recommend business school to other people and he said No, theres so many better ways to waste your money than that. So, I mean, first of all it depends on the content of the book. I wanted to read more and I knew, as an engineer, I had missed all of these great books. Weve got I think over 8,000 published authors whove signed up and said I am this person. I emailed Kareem and I said I love your reviewer, I love the book that you talked about. He talked about a book that talked about Ryanair, I forget the name of the book, and he said, Dude, Ill send it to you.. The scion of the wealthy Chandler family who took over the Los Angeles Times and transformed it into a nationally respected publication. Otis Chandler is the co-founder and CEO of Goodreads.com. Him on everywhere else? I should say that. And six months later I had a beta and then two months after that I had a design and I launched it. Now its really easy to put down a hundred bucks and see, hey do I get any traction, and Go ahead. Andrew: Is that really him whos going out on all those networks? Can you talk about that? [7] On March 28, 2013, Amazon announced its acquisition of Goodreads,[8] and by July 23, 2013, Goodreads announced their user base had grown to 20 million members. And in thinking that way, I realized wow, books are kinda broken on the internet. You can get real time feedback about something you write. So thats important to understand, but its easier said then done. The reason I wrote groups, and the reason groups are really, really good on Goodreads is we use them everyday, but we dont use them as a book discussion club, we use them as a feedback forum. Otis figured he might prove him wrong, and in 2007, launched Goodreads, a book catalog and review site that he coded from his LA apartment. If you want to narrow your search down a little bit further you can click on the city, and I used to live in Los Angeles, so well experiment by clicking on Los Angeles. Edit Personal Investments Section. And not work. That gave his business enough traction to raise money from investors and grow it to over 2.6 million members. Interviewee: Yeah, I mean if its you, do it. When he decided to launch his own site just for book lovers, a respected colleague told him there was "probably not a very big market there." Otis figured he might prove him wrong, and in 2007, launched Goodreads, a book catalog and review site that he coded from his LA apartment. "[22], As of 2012, membership was required to use but free. And if we want to follow up with them theres their email address and their website right on the bottom so we can connect directly. Now he gets the same write-up and nothing happens. If you havent heard of Otis Chandler its because he spends more time coding his site, Goodreads.com, than promoting himself. [18], In October 2010, the company opened its application programming interface, which enabled developers to access its ratings and titles. Interviewee: Right. Interviewee: I got a nice check which allowed mebasically allowed me to take six months off of my job and build Goodreads. In 2013, Goodreads sold to Amazon for an undisclosed sum; and today, it's the world's largest site for readers, with 125 million users. Andrew: Did he use it? And Good Reads it was obvious. Interviewee: Heh, right. Alright, lets go back to when you were at Stanford. If they were Christian, theyd go to ChristianSingles. Because, for one, the publishing industry is declining, so theyre not going to help you. And it turns out that most problems in mechanical engineering are pretty solved. Andrew: I remember one of the things we talked about, you spoke at a live Mixergy event about how to build virility into your product and you said that when a user registers youd ask them for their friends immediately, right? So I wanted to provide that experience around reading. [74], In early 2021, Amazon removed all new and used copies of William Luther Pierce's white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries from sales on its platform and subsidiary platforms, citing concerns with the QAnon movement as the cause. The New York Times noted that Goodreads, at the time of the acquisition, had a more reputable reviewing system than Amazon's. [31] Linked in, I think. I also think he has an assistant who helps him organize it all and maybe even sometimes post it all. Number three when I finally come back to the US you can come out to a Mixergy event to see him in person. Andrew: How are they doing that? And, if youre on the site and you have no friends, then everywhere you go its saying you have no friends whove read this book, add some friends. If your name is Stephanie [Myer] or Dan Brown, then theyre going to help you. Better even than many of the business classes that I took at NYU. If I know what my friend is reading, or has read, that gives me a basis for conversation around that. Andrew: 2.7 million registered users I said in the beginning you got up to 650,000 on your own, no outside funding. Shes loving that line that you said, Ill teach you everything about business school in two days. I love it too Big Space. He was the fourth and final member of the Chandler family to hold the paper's top position. And I could see social networking was probably going to do the same. Andrew: Alright, Ive got to tell you too I looked at one of your latest reads, the book by Tessla, and I said well, Tessla wrote a book, how interesting could it be. Otis Chandler Founder and CEO in San Francisco Visit my company website. Its cataloguing your books. [68], Authors who are aware of the site have noted problematic qualities of Goodreads affecting discoverability and search engine results, particularly the platform's inability to sort pseudonyms, and its refusal to allow authors to choose the primary author name that appears on book records. Maybe after six years of an intense startup I was burned out. What to give them and what not to? Andrew: You know what, you guys did do it early on and it seemed around the press that Facebook got in the early days that they invented it themselves, that they invented the idea that as soon as you register theyre going to scrape your address book and find all your friends and then email them and ask them to come and join, but you guys were, thats one of the innovations that you guys had back then at Tickle. But the point is, you went from big generic to lots of little niche ones and the niche ones worked because they were tight around a community and the interests that people liked. Scott Everett for NPR I cant imagine what the next thing is going to be. Got up to 600, let me see if I got the number right, 650,000 members. [4][20] Later that year, Goodreads introduced an algorithm to suggest books to registered users and had over five million members. [3][4] In December 2007, the site had 650,000 members[5] and 10,000,000 books had been added. were creating profiles, and I said weve got to make these guys special. I cant remember who I was thinking of but guys with serious cred. And plus its more fun for me because I get to discover books, etc. Interviewee: So we launched it, I think, in December of 2006. Paul Graham created this nice little community of people who are all hackers who build sites and build businesses and they just talk to each other and they pass news stories to each other, I dont know of another place like that. Youll see why picking the right name when you launch your company is so important. 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