So yesterday Amazon announced its buying Goodreads. Not "in talks to," not "considering" - announced, more or less done, pending whatever regulatory rubber-stamping these things always need. Terms werent disclosed, which is corporate-speak for "youll never know how many hundreds of millions changed hands, so stop asking."
Ive had a Goodreads account since sometime in 2009. I dont log every book - I definitely forget half the paperbacks I pick up at the used bookstore two blocks from my apartment and never bother adding them - but my shelf sits around 340 books right now, which is a weirdly satisfying number to stare at even though it mostly just proves I cant finish a trilogy without buying four other things in between.
And now Amazon owns it.
I want to be annoyed about this in some pure, principled way, and I am, a little. Mostly Im just tired, though. Two weeks ago it was Google Reader getting the axe (July 1st is the date theyve given us, so weve all got a countdown clock running now whether we asked for one or not), and now the other free, ad-light thing I actually like using is getting folded into a company whose entire business model is "figure out what you want to buy, then sell it to you." Otis Chandler put up a post on the Goodreads blog yesterday afternoon promising nothing will change and that the site will "stay independent." Ive read that sentence from enough acquired startups at this point that its basically wallpaper. It might even be true - Amazon has left some acquisitions alone for years and years. But "trust us" isnt exactly a product roadmap.
Heres my actual worry, and its a dumb one probably: Amazon review sections are a mess. Not all of them, but you know the ones I mean - a product gets bumped in some deal newsletter and by the next morning theres forty reviews that all use suspiciously similar phrasing about how their life changed. Goodreads has its own review culture, for better or worse (the "readers review-bomb an author over some drama that has nothing to do with the actual book" thing has already happened more than once), but its still recognizably a place where people who read books talk to other people who read books. Im not thrilled about that getting merged, even loosely, into a system built to move units at 2am on a Tuesday.
The other thing nagging at me is the pattern of it. Instagram went to Facebook last year, some kid's app called Summly got bought by Yahoo a few days ago for something like $30 million (hes seventeen, which mostly just makes me feel like Ive wasted my twenties), and now this. Everything interesting eventually gets bought by something enormous. I dont think Goodreads is going anywhere tomorrow - nobody pays for a thing just to shut it down next quarter - but Ive started exporting my shelf as a CSV every couple months now, just in case, which is a very specific kind of paranoia to have picked up this spring. I did the same thing with my Reader subscriptions the day that shutdown got announced, and I still havent settled on a replacement I actually like. Tried Feedly for about four days and kept closing the tab out of pure habit, like my brain hadnt gotten the memo yet.
None of this is a tragedy. Nobody owes me a free book-cataloging site that never changes hands. But theres something worth noticing in how normal this has all started to feel - a company you like gets bought, you shrug, you back up your data, you move on with your Tuesday. A couple years ago Id have written a much angrier post about this, probably with more exclamation points. Now Im mostly just filing it under things that happen now, and going to go add the book Im currently reading to my shelf before I forget, while I can still pretend it's mine and not a line item in somebody elses spreadsheet.