Amazon competes with its own Goodreads with launch of book discovery service, ‘Your Books’ | TechCrunch

While the focus here is on book discovery to fuel future purchases, and not necessarily tracking and reviewing books, as on Goodreads, there's a lot of overlap with Amazon's other platform for book lovers it acquired back in 2013, and has done little to modernize since. As on Goodreads, the new tool will help users organize their own collection of the books they've read and those they aim to, and will help them find new ones. But instead of reading through reviews from other Goodreads users, the reviews here are from Amazon shoppers.

The launch of the new book recommendation resource arrives alongside another scandal facing Goodreads, where an author lost a book deal after admitting to anonymously "review bombing" other debut authors' books. The issue of review bombing has been an ongoing issue on Goodreads, as The New York Times reported in June, often tanking new books before they're even published. For authors, that means Goodreads has become a double-edged sword - the same features that can generate excitement around their new titles can also be used against them.