Amazon Acquires Social Reading Site Goodreads

Social reading website Goodreads has been providing book recommendations for quite some time now, but it seems that an even bigger force in the book industry is taking over. Amazon announced today that they have acquired Goodreads for an undisclosed amount of money, but the deal should close by the end of Q2 2013.

Goodreads launched in early 2007 and it raised almost $3 million in funding since then, so it's definitely been a successful ride for the founders of the service. Goodreads currently has over 16 million members who have added over 230 million books to the Goodreads database, with more than 30,000 book clubs. The service allows you to find your friends and share book recommendations with one another.

This type of social integration will only strengthen Amazon's lead in the book and e-book market, where Apple has also been trying to leverage the industry with its own iBooks offering. With the acquisition, Amazon could easily implement Goodreads' features into its Kindle lineup to give Kindle users better recommendations, and to even let users find their friends on Amazon's network.

However, Goodreads CEO and co-founder Otis Chandler assures users that the service will not be going away or changing. With that said, it'll be interesting to see how Amazon will integrate itself into Goodreads, and how Goodreads will integrate into Amazon's ecosystem. Details on that front are scarce, but I'm sure we'll hear more about Amazon's plans for the service in the near future.