Goodreads Stuck as a Product

This is painful to read as a long-time Goodreads (and LibraryThing) user from the “before times”…

Goodreads, Amazon’s website for book lovers, causes problems in publishing – The Washington Post:

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.

How to Read Your Kindle in the Bathtub

Never forget…

I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.

Source: Book Learning – The New York Times