(2013-03-29) Amazon Buys Goodreads

Amazon has bought Good Reads. Bummer (Monopoly).

Jordan Weissmann shows how the Pareto Principle applies to book sales, and the importance of Word Of Mouth and Social Media (vs Book Store browsing and Advertising) in driving that behavior. So Amazon has just bought the ecosystem where many of America's most influential readers choose their books.

Craig Mod thinks they should have worked with ReadMill instead. (ReadMill) suffers from the thing that any book-related company or product or startup that is not a Kindle suffers from: It’s a slog to get content into it. (That reminds me of RSS-subscribing UX challenge. Perhaps there's an opportunity here for creating similar experience for both behaviors?)

• Jun'2013 update: Readmill has partnered with The Guardian, The Atavaist and Livrada. The Guardian and Atavist are using Readmill’s technology to enable direct sales through their websites; once a user has bought a Guardian Short or Atavist e-single (Thin Book), he or she can use the “Send to Readmill” button to read it from Readmill’s app. And Livrada, which enables users and organizations to gift ebooks, will use “Send to Readmill” for delivery of EPub files.