Amazon Acquires Goodreads

Seattle-based bookseller Amazon.com has acquired Goodreads, a popular Web site featuring user-generated content of books. Though Amazon acquired a similar site, Shelfari, back in 2008, there seem to be no plans to combine the two. From Publishers Weekly:

Goodreads, which is one of the most popular among a raft of sites created as a book recommendation engine--members are directed to titles by seeing what their friends are reading, or have recommended--does not currently sell any books, but many in the industry saw it as an ideal sales outlet.

The details of the purchase, which is set to close in the second quarter of 2013, were not disclosed by Amazon, but the retail giant confirmed that Goodreads will remain headquartered in San Francisco. The site currently has over 16 million members, averages 37 million unique visitors a month, and has over 30,000 book clubs.

When pressed about whether Goodreads would begin to carry buy links to Amazon products, PW says Amazon representatives responded that that “don’t have any plans to change anything about the buy links in the short term, but in the long term we’re going to do what’s best for our users.”