Potential Apple/Goodreads Partnership Quashed by Amazon Acquisition

Thursday April 18, 2013 12:18 pm PDT by Jordan Golson

Goodreads 1 Before Amazon's acquisition of Goodreads earlier this year, Apple had been talking to the company about a partnership between Goodreads and Apple's iBookstore.

However, once Amazon got into acquisition talks with Goodreads, those talks with Apple broke off, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.

Goodreads had proposed its reviews and ratings appear within iTunes when users searched for a title, one of the people said. iTunes has already integrated Rotten Tomatoes movie ratings in such a way. Apple was entertaining the idea, but talks didn’t progress much, two of the people said.

Around March, Apple pinged Goodreads to move forward with the talks, these people said. ITunes officials were perplexed when Goodreads executives went quiet, two of the people said.

Goodreads is a popular book-recommendation site that would seem to fit well into Amazon's sales recommendation system. Amazon has indicated that it will keep the company as a separate entity, but will integrate its recommendations into its system going forward.

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Top Rated Comments

MattJessop

176 months ago

Am I the only one who doesn't want to see every cool little social/technology startup that gains traction just bought by Amazon/Apple/Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Samsung/Wayne Enterprises??

To it's credit Google seems to be the only one not buying up companies to stop their services being used on competitors devices.

They just shut them down 6 months later instead.

Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)

question fear

176 months ago

Doesnt sound so much like this was quashed by Amazon as "coincidentally going nowhere when Amazon came along."

If talks weren't really progressing, it's not like Amazon swooped in to destroy the deal. The headline reads like Amazon bought Goodreads just to prevent the ten people who browse iBooks from having Goodreads integrated.

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Chupa Chupa

176 months ago

Meh. iBooks is fine on its own.

Right, which is exactly why Apple wanted to do a partnership w/ them... because they understand iBooks is fine in its own vacuum. :rolleyes:

The # of heads in sand around here is astonishing. No company, no product survives resting on its own laurels. In this case even the #1 digital bookseller thought Goodreads was important enough to just buy the entire company. But, right, iBooks is fine doing nothing to expand interest in the face of stiff competition from Amazon and Google.

Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)

paul4339

176 months ago

wow, you'd think that Apple would have bought them shortly after iBooks was released (16 million members)

Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)