So Amazon bought Goodreads last Thursday. Terms weren't disclosed, which is the usual non-answer for these things, but the deal itself was real enough that I spent Thursday night doing something I should've done a long time ago: exporting my entire library to a CSV before anything happens to it.
I've got 1,142 books logged on that site. Ratings, reviews, half-finished shelves with names like "meant to read" and "started, regret it." That's not nothing. That's years of me typing star ratings into a browser at 11pm instead of sleeping. And the second I saw the acquisition news I did not think "oh good, more investment." I thought "oh no, here comes the graveyard."
Because Amazon already owns a books-and-reviews site. It's called Shelfari, and if you haven't heard of it that's kind of the point. They bought it in 2008, folded it in, and it's been quietly rotting ever since, updated just often enough to technically still exist. So forgive me for not immediately trusting the line about how Goodreads will "continue to operate independently." I've read that sentence before, about other acquired things, and it rarely ages well.
To be fair to Otis Chandler (the Goodreads CEO, in case the name's not familiar) his blog post about the deal read like he actually meant it: he talked about wanting the resources to build things faster, better recommendations, that kind of thing. And I get it. Goodreads has always felt a little held together with tape. The Android app is rough. The site design hasn't meaningfully changed in years. More engineering muscle isn't automatically a bad thing.
But here's my actual worry, and it's a boring, specific one: the API. I use a little third-party tool that pulls my "currently reading" shelf and drops a widget on this blog's sidebar (you can see it over there, assuming I haven't broken it again). That kind of thing only works because Goodreads has kept its API open and reasonably well documented. Amazon does not have a great track record of leaving APIs alone once they own the thing underneath them. If this turns into "sign in with your Amazon account, and also here's a Kindle upsell every time you rate a book," a lot of the small tools built on top of Goodreads are going to quietly die. Not with an announcement. Just a 404 six months from now and a shrug.
There's also the obvious thing nobody's saying directly, which is that Amazon now owns the largest social layer sitting on top of book data that isn't Amazon's own book data. Reviews, ratings, the whole "people who liked this also liked" graph — that's incredibly valuable if you're trying to sell more Kindle books, and Amazon is always trying to sell more Kindle books. I don't think that's sinister exactly. It's just obviously the point.
Anyway. The export took about four minutes and produced a CSV with columns I'll probably never open again unless something goes wrong. Which is very on brand for how I handle every service I like: ignore it right up until the acquisition headline, panic-export, then go back to ignoring it. I did the same thing with my Google Reader subscriptions a few weeks back after that whole shutdown announcement, and that list is still just sitting in a folder called "reader-backup-DO-NOT-DELETE" that I will absolutely delete by accident sometime in 2015.
I'm not saying don't use Goodreads. I still will, obviously — there's no real alternative that has the same critical mass, and building your own book-logging spreadsheet is the kind of thing that sounds charming for about two weeks before you stop doing it. LibraryThing exists and is fine and nobody I know uses it. I'm just saying: back your stuff up now, while the export button still works exactly the way you expect it to, because that's usually the first thing that quietly changes.
One small unrelated complaint while I'm here: the Goodreads Android app crashed on me twice this week trying to open the barcode scanner, and I don't think that's related to any of this, I think it's just been broken for months and I finally got annoyed enough to mention it.