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Goodreads once promised a community built by readers. Now it sits firmly inside Amazon’s surveillance ecosystem.
Amazon’s 2013 acquisition of Goodreads might seem like old news to anyone who considers themselves a regular user of the website. However, in the era of luxury surveillance and opt-in monitoring we might take another look at the relevance of this bygone purchase.
Goodreads is the self-proclaimed “world’s largest site for readers,” but its origins are humble. Created by Elizabeth and Otis Chandler, the couple originally launched Goodreads from their own home in 2007. The site allows users to catalogue their current reads in virtual ‘bookshelves,’ share their thoughts through ratings and reviews, and discuss and create communities with other readers using their message boards, ‘friend’ requests and ‘following’ features. These characteristics and the community-focused nature of the site soon established it as the default space for online readers, with millions of members at the time of purchase.
Before Goodreads' acquisition, Amazon had already begun its expansion into the realm of books. The company in 2011 made Book Depository (its small but growing book-selling competitor) its subsidiary. Then, it set its sights on the online reader’s hub Goodreads. But why? Goodreads itself is not significantly profit-generating; the site was meant for community building and reader discussion. At first glance the move seems in opposition to Amazon’s profit driven ethos.
This is where the term surveillance capitalism becomes relevant. Coined by author Shoshana Zuboff, surveillance capitalism describes an economic reality that involves the collection of data beyond that which is necessary for the basic functioning of a service. This excess data is termed behavioural surplus and is subsequently processed through machine intelligence to create predictions. In the context of online websites like Goodreads, behavioural surplus includes things like clicks on a website, the time spent on certain pages, searched terms, and more. This behavioural surplus is used, not only internally by the businesses collecting it, but also organised into prediction products and sold elsewhere to other companies it would benefit, creating a market unto itself. Zuboff calls this behavioural futures markets. Through monitoring and prediction, surveillance capitalism seeks to create an entirely legible world of total certainty that will ultimately benefit companies involved through the profit it would generate. It does so by continuously expanding modes of profit-making, fueled by intense and lasting competition. Its mantra: any data can be profitable.
Writing for The Atlantic, in his article “The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’”, Chris Gilliard describes a dystopian world where every waking moment is logged, and all behaviours tracked for self optimisation through Amazon’s devices. He later reveals that these devices – the Amazon Ring Camera, Amazon Echo, Amazon Halo Rise etc. – already exist. Gilliard calls this type of opt-in surveillance luxury surveillance. Everything has been swallowed by, enveloped into, the Amazon monopoly. Even reading is without exception.
The multi-national corporation has created the ability to link your Goodreads account to its Amazon Kindle e-reader. This allows users access to features like cataloguing highlighted quotes and self-categorisation of owned books. Most importantly, it allows Amazon access to different forms of information such as reading speed, preferred genres and authors, along with a host of other data-generating behaviors.
In Goodreads’ “About Goodreads” section the company states: “Our recommendation engine analyzes 20 billion data points to give suggestions tailored to your literary tastes.” This monopoly setup allows for a seamless profit-generating process that internally transitions straight from advertisement to product purchase.
Since the acquisition of Goodreads, however, the site’s interface has changed little – a gripe of longstanding users. If you visit Goodreads today, it is reminiscent of early 2000’s message boards: clunky and far from streamlined. It seems we have reached the stage of surveillance capitalism and corporate monopoly where complacency has set in for Amazon, erasing the need for improvement or even basic site functioning. Layoffs in Kindle and Goodreads in 2025 and the shutting down of Book Depository in 2023 show us the extent to which Amazon is willing to sacrifice and “streamline”.
In this profit-focused environment, Goodreads’ own choice awards have become oversaturated with monopolistic authors. Sarah J. Maas dominates the fantasy categories with new releases, and Stephen King remains the undisputed "king of horror" with his ever-growing bibliography, despite mixed reviews. Many readers are growing tired of the monotony and independent authors and small publishers are growing indignant at the lack of deserved opportunities.
In chapter one of her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Zuboff explains how competition and pressure for constant innovation in this new economic status quo has allowed for recommendation engines to not only predict, but actively form our behaviour. This allows for a more efficient automated processing of behavioural data into prediction products. Following Zuboff's logic, one might forecast that this would entail a gradual move towards monopoly recommendations and by extension a de facto increase in filtering out of outlier (or unpredictable) behaviours problematic to streamlining attempts. In the context of Goodreads, this might look like the exclusion of niche indie authors and the dominance of widely applicable popular tropes, as we see online today.
To finish, I would like to leave you with a quote from one of the original co-founders of Goodreads, Otis Chandler. One that is eerily relevant to this discussion: “Knowledge is power, and power is best shared among readers.”
Amazon’s perpetually growing influence and power is fueled by the collection of knowledge produced by users of their websites and devices. Unfortunately, the case of Goodreads represents a broader shift from community-based power to the kind of economic oligarchy that we see today under surveillance capitalism.