Goodreads: Making Reading Social (Books in Browsers, Oct 22, 2010)

							Making Reading Social
    A little about Goodreads

• Goodreads' mission is to get people
excited about reading.
• 4 million members, Goodreads is the
largest social network for readers in the
world.
• Goodreads members recommend books,
compare what they are reading, keep track
of what they’ve read, form book clubs and
much more.
  Book Discussion & Discovery

Each month:
• 4.5 million books cataloged
• 900,000 books marked as ‘to-read’
• 1 million discussion comments
     Book Marketing Platform
• 14,000 authors in the Author Program
• First Reads: advance copy giveaway
  program has given out over 50,000 books
• Advertising: Book Launch Packages
Taking our best content to the
            web
       Social Reading API
Ways people are using the
          API
     • Review syndication
     • Goodreads Connect
Now syndicating Goodreads reviews
 We have a lot of reviews!




• Goodreads 19,430 reviews
• Amazon has 1,928 reviews
• B&N has 554 reviews
• Sony store has 57 reviews
High Quality Reviews
It’s not just the popular titles

 • 80 million ratings across 2 million distinct titles
 • 8 million reviews across 500,000 distinct titles
                  The Long Tail of Books
Out of 114 million books cataloged:
• 5% are the Twilight Series
• The top 100 books represent 18%
• The top 5,000 books represent 45%



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                                           Books
Why syndicate Goodreads
       reviews?

• Helps sell more books.
• There are a lot of them.
• Adds an instant community-feeling
       The cost: free

• Reviews must be branded as
being from Goodreads
• Links back
Worldcat
Edelweiss about to launch a
feature that uses our API to
   display to-read counts
   Goodreads Connect

• Access to the social graph of readers
• Access to a members bookshelves
What is the #1 influence in
deciding whether to read a
       book or not?

    Friend Recommendations!
 Case Study: Blio

Launched last month with
  Goodreads Connect
Example OAuth Approval
Goodreads Connect is Oauth
          based
 • Member approves Goodreads
 connection
 • Use API with public/secret keys to
 pull friend reviews, books, etc
    Author Websites

Show off Goodreads ratings and
           reviews
Progress Updates
Users love entering their
         status
• 9,000 a day
• 20% have a comment
Integrated with Goodreads
        Iphone app
 Goodreads API

www.goodreads.com/api
     Thanks!

goodreads.com/otis
 twitter.com/otown