Yeah, point taken. So I pitted their pitting. I have a different viewpoint. They don’t have to agree with me; no one else has to agree with me. That’s fine.
“pact with the devil”
'I’m gutted"
“A true reader likes the feel of a book in their hands” (so anyone who doesn’t read a paper book isn’t a true reader, which admittedly is a different topic from Amazon buying GR)
“break free from the shackles that come with using Kindles”
“This is a real disaster”
“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo”
“$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$”
GR has been “crucified at the altar of Amazon”
No, sales of Nook books don’t make Amazon money. Still doesn’t mean you can’t read a book on your Nook and then talk about it on GR, unless the now Amazon-owned GR shuts that down. If they do, that will be a shame and I hope there will be another book discussion site to accommodate all readers. I’m not saying there are no concerns with a monopoly that is as large as Amazon.
Also, yes, contributors to an online community make it what it is. I suspect that the facilitators are also making a contribution, though, and at the end of the day I guess they own it and can do what they want with it - IANAL. If they sell the community to a big outfit and it self-destructs, that’s sad, but it’s still the decision of the owners, even if it turns out to be a bad one.
Those aren’t people hysterically overreacting (as you claimed in your original post). Those are people who are using strong words to express their dismay over the (entirely predictable) changes they foresee coming to a site they care a great deal about.
I never said they didn’t.
And that in a nutshell is the problem. Why is it fine and dandy for a handful of people to wreck something built and maintained by literally thousands of people in cyberspace, when we generally don’t allow such actions in meatspace?
I am curious: have you ever before experienced the effects of corporatization of a social networking site? I’ve been through two: the wrecking of Livejournal by Six Apart and later SUP, and the current ongoing destruction of the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forum by the BBC. Watching a once-vibrant place slowly turn into a ghost town is not fun. Losing the online community you’ve hung out with for years is even less fun.
I have three perspectives on Goodreads, and the Amazon acquisition is bad for all three.
As an author:
On Goodreads, I can promote my books any way I choose, no matter who published them or what platform the ebooks are made for. When you visit one of my book pages, there are no links saying, “HEY! BUY THIS INSTEAD!” There is no preferential treatment given to Goodreads’ favorite publishers because there aren’t any. Amazon is getting into publishing in a big way: buying out small presses once they gain control of their distribution, and even starting Amazon’s own imprints. Once they own Goodreads, it is likely to point people at Kindle books and Amazon imprints, just like amazon.com does.
As a bookstore owner:
Goodreads is vendor-agnostic. They don’t care who you buy books from, and their presence doesn’t harm my business at all. Once they’re owned by Amazon, those links to indie stores are sure to go away and it will be one more big marketing website directing people to Amazon and away from brick and mortar stores like mine.
As an individual reader:
I have tuned my Goodreads experience. It shows the sources I want and connects me to people whose opinions I respect. I have no desire to be flooded by reviews from Amazon’s favorite people (and, of course, shills). I don’t want Amazon to see my “to read” lists and see their embedded ads, which ad blockers can’t block because they are served from the same domain. Also, I mentioned brick and mortar bookstores in my previous paragraph. I like bookstores. I love comparing books side by side, leafing through them, and picking which ones to take home. I like talking to bookstore employees who love what they do and make good recommendations. I deeply resent the destruction Amazon has wrought upon those stores and I hate seeing them take Goodreads (which does not direct people away from shopping wherever they choose) and turn it into another Amazon marketing site.
My main complaint is that Amazon already owns a competing (and less full-featured) service called Shelfari and they own like a third of another service called LibraryThing. Plus, as a lifelong bookhound and a Kindle owner, Amazon already knows everything I’ve bought for the last ten years.
I’m a happy Amazon customer but I value opinions and reviews from non-Amazon readers. Competition is good for everyone.
Not “fine and dandy” but probably legal unless they could be stopped somehow on the basis of Amazon being a monopoly. I signed up for GR about a year ago and don’t remember what the TOS were, but it probably addressed this issue in there somewhere. Things always change. How could this be addressed legally? Would there need to be laws in place so that the founders of any particular site can’t sell without the permission of all their member-contributors? How are the “rights” of the founders to be balanced with the “rights” of the member-contributors?
I don’t think I’ve ever gotten so dependent on a website, especially a social website, that I would be “gutted” if it was bought out by a large company. I can’t think of a particular website I’ve visited that has changed hands to a big corporation before. I’ve used message boards that I greatly enjoyed but have since become less popular and cleared out for various other reasons and it’s disappointing but I was never so invested that it was an extreme loss. I get a lot more attached to loved ones in real life than on a website.
I liked GR but I used the reviews to figure out what to read and posted some reviews of my own and that’s about it. Something about the way its book discussions are organized kept me from participating the way I would have liked.
It can be addressed legally at the time of the site’s founding if the founders anticipate the problem (and care about it). I know that the news/discussion site Metafilter is incorporated as a limited liability corporation, and the terms of the incorporation are such that the site can’t be sold to another commercial entity. I bet Wikipedia is operating under a similar charter (since corporate ownership of such a site would completely destroy its usefulness).
But after the site’s founded,up and running… That’s a lot tougher, and (not being a lawyer) I’m not sure how it can be addressed. But the fact that it can’t (at least right now) doesn’t prevent it from being a genuine problem for online discourse in the long term. Cyberspace is sorely lacking in the meatspace equivalent of the public square, and as we rely more and more on online discourse for information, this becomes more problematic.
That’s what I thought. The experience of watching a site slowly dying from the dwindles is quite different from the experience of seeing one that’s active and healthy being wrecked by the choices of an outside entity which abruptly swoops down out of nowhere and starts incorporating “improvements” the userbase doesn’t want. The latter is much more distressing because while you’re watching it you’re conscious of the fact that the resulting destruction of the community didn’t have to happen, as everything was running just fine prior to the new ownership taking over.
A minor but important nit: online socializing IS real life. It’s just not occurring in a physical space. I’ve been on some websites (including this one) for over a decade - that’s longer than I’ve lived in my current house, and about as long as I’ve held my current job. Many of the people I first met online I’m closer to than I am to any of my meatspace neighbors and coworkers. I’ve managed to meet up quite a few of them in meatspace when I travel, and right now I’m currently planning a three week vacation to Turkey and Greece with one of them.
That’s why the lack of protection for these communities matters. They do play an important social role for many people, one that can’t always be duplicated offline. And while no one’s going to die if the internet becomes largely corporate-controlled, the same thing is true offline. We won’t die of our towns and cities lose all their truly public spaces, but our quality of live will be degraded nonetheless.
One important piece of information nobody’s brought up yet: Amazon does this a lot.
They did it to IMDB and that site has never been visibly hurt since the Amazon acquisition. Sure, they weren’t AMAZON when it happened, but it’s a good case study to point to.
Actually, quite a few people over on that Goodreads thread have pointed out several ways Amazon altered IMDB unfavorably. They didn’t totally trash the board, but their acquisition of it wasn’t completely benign. (Not being a big user of IMDB, I have to take those writers word for it, though.)
Amazon bought IMDB in 1998. It didn’t become the site we all know and love until after the Amazon acquisition. So these people are idiots in my eyes until they can prove otherwise.