What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
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Bad amazon imports have been importing for years, but never on this scale. E.g. even 5 years ago amazon would replace a valid description with something idiotic like "Book by John Jones."
But what's happening now is not only what you reference, but also every single customer-added entry on the Amazon website is being imported as if it were a unique entry. So if your aunt sold 500 of her used books on Amazon, each one of them would be assigned an ASIN, and her description might be "Used copy, torn cover, slight foxing" and that would become the official description on GR as all of those 500 books are imported. ASINs in GR are supposed to only be for kindle editions; now they are attached to paperbacks and hardbacks too. So now every distinct individual GR edition has multiple duplicates being imported which are not valid.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Thanks, Lobstergirl! Yikes, that's even worse than I thought.It is definitely annoying. :(
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https://www.goodreads.com/search?page...
I've been slowly going through my own shelves to fix broken descriptions. It's bad—out of every 50 books, there are at least 3–6 where the description has been replaced by something like 'Excellent Book' and at least a dozen where a full description has been replaced by a shorter, choppier description. And that's just me looking at one edition of each book on my shelves.
Mod
Some short excerpts of a Washington Post article of July 1, 2023.
"Goodreads was the future of book reviews. Then Amazon bought it."
"Goodreads — an Amazon-owned review site beloved by the bookish — has grown beleaguered.
The site is built on outdated technological infrastructure, which made the cost of overhauling and updating it a challenge that was ultimately not worth it for the e-commerce giant, according to former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Meanwhile, limited manual content moderation and a lack of protective features allow users to engage in targeted harassment known as “review bombing” — behavior that has resulted in the cancellation of books and their authors."
[skipping the parts about review bombing, you can click the link below to read the whole article although it may be paywalled for you.]
"Former employees said Amazon seemed happy to mine Goodreads for its user-generated data and otherwise let it limp along with limited resources. In Amazon’s more than 20-year history, the company has made dozens of acquisitions, and it is not unusual for it to try to cheaply acquire properties in markets that it wants to dominate, only to let them languish. Until recently, Amazon owned Book Depository and camera-enthusiast favorite DPReview, and it still operates discount marketplace Woot, collectibles website AbeBooks and movie database IMDb.
Goodreads “hasn’t been all that well maintained, or updated, or kept up with what you would expect from social communities or apps in 2023,” said Jane Friedman, a publishing industry consultant. “It does feel like Amazon bought it and then abandoned it.”
Amazon spokesperson Ashely Vanicek said that “By joining Amazon, Goodreads has accelerated their mission to delight customers with the help of Amazon’s resources and technology.”
“We continue investing and growing Goodreads as a community for readers and authors,” she said in a statement, "and have created opportunities for Amazon and Goodreads to invent new services for readers and authors alike.” "
[snip, discussion of Elizabeth Gilbert pulling her book]
Unlike Amazon’s marketplace, Goodreads “is designed so you don’t have to buy a product to review a book,” said former Amazon employee Kristi Coulter, who worked in publishing and is the author of a forthcoming memoir, “Exit Interview,” about her experience. “That makes it ripe for abuse.”
Amazon bought Goodreads in 2013 for a reported $150 million with the hope that the online community of book lovers and the data they created about books would advance its mission of selling everything to everyone.
More than a decade later, even as other social platforms have undergone multiple reinventions, little has changed about Goodreads, a beige website where readers can rate books from one to five stars, write reviews and talk to other readers on old-school forums, some of which have tens of thousands of members.
“In its heyday, [Goodreads] was more of a help selling books than a hindrance,” said Maris Kreizman, an author who hosts a podcast about books for Literary Hub.
But Goodreads has remained so clunky in its design and is so difficult to use, Kreizman said, that it is no longer fulfilling the promise it once had of “bringing book lovers together and making new communities.”
“I feel like the trajectory was, Goodreads was innovating and doing good things, it was exciting,” she said. “And then Amazon bought it. The end.”
The first thing Amazon wanted Goodreads to do after acquiring it was build an app for the Kindle, according to one of the former employees.
The Kindle, first released in 2007, was an extremely popular device for reading books, and Amazon was eager to broaden its possibilities by bringing in a social component. At the time, the company was trying to get a foothold in social media, where it had trailed its competitors in the tech world, a former Amazon executive said.
The Goodreads app allowed readers to highlight passages and share them with other readers, a feature that sparked excitement in academia about the possible future for “social reading.”
The social aspect of Goodreads was also attractive to publishers, who had access to data for the first time about what kinds of books ignited conversation among readers, the Los Angeles Times argued in a 2010 series on digital reading. At the time, it seemed possible that Goodreads’s data could power a personalized recommendation algorithm akin to what Spotify built for music.
Coulter worked at Amazon from 2006 to 2018 and recalled attending a dinner in New York where executives discussed Amazon’s purchase of the site.
“There was interest in using Goodreads data to help power Kindle features,” she recalled. “There was all this excitement and momentum behind it.”
But after Amazon bought Goodreads, it gradually became clear that the technology was old and the data not well organized, and that a significant investment would be required to bring the site up to speed, according to two former Goodreads employees.
The reason “it feels stuck as a product,” one of the former Goodreads employees said, is because “it was painfully slow to create change.” As a result, proposed features like a recommendation algorithm or a news feed for the Kindle powered by Goodreads were never built.
Amazon largely let Goodreads operate independently. The company could still get valuable data from Goodreads users, like reviews and genre labels, as well as advertising revenue without needing to commit much in the way of resources to the site, three former employees said.
There was also a concern that any major changes to the platform could scare people away. One former employee compared Goodreads to Reddit, an 18-year-old internet forum where users are revolting because of modifications to the site. “People feel like they can’t anger the community,” the former employee said.
Ultimately, Amazon is pulled in so many directions that it’s common for teams to get pulled onto “another shiny object,” Coulter said. “It would be in line with what I’ve seen many times at Amazon,” she said. “People just get kind of distracted.”
And as Amazon pursued other goals, authors, publishers and readers said Goodreads became increasingly toxic."
[skipping]
Goodreads does have moderators; their official job titles are “Goodreads experts,” per LinkedIn and public job listings. Moderators are supposed to remove posts that violate Goodreads’s rules — for example, reviews that attack an author but aren’t actually about their book. But the moderation is manual, and the queue for flagged reviews is long.
[skipping]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/techno...
This problem seems to have been compounded with the default editions no longer sorting by most popular *and* the malfunctioning search engine.I'm really worried about the future of this site. :(
Every day, this bot is changing authors, misspelling author names, misspelling titles, changing punctuation, putting titles in all lower case or all caps, and changing the plot descriptions of many hundreds if not thousands of books.
Is Goodreads aware of this? I've been trying to correct errors when I see them, but even a team of dedicated librarians can only do so much.