Goodreads

Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler both graduated from Stanford University and met through a mutual friend in 2001. Otis had worked as a programmer for the early social networking site Tickle.com and the dating site LoveHappens.com; Elizabeth studied English at Stanford, went on to the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and then joined the Los Angeles Times.⁠[1][1][1][1][2][2][2]

In December 2006, Otis and Elizabeth Chandler founded Goodreads.com. Otis said that while browsing a friend’s bookshelf for ideas, it struck him that he would rather turn to friends than to strangers or bestseller lists when choosing books, so he decided to build a site where he could see friends’ bookshelves and reviews; he had also noticed dating sites fragmenting into niches and thought readers might be a similar niche. Otis wrote the code and Elizabeth wrote the site copy, and the site was first built in Otis’s Los Angeles apartment, without an office, a business model, or employees.⁠[1][3][1][1][3][4][4]

Goodreads launched in January 2007. Its business plan assumed that publishers and authors would want to buy ads to market directly to readers who had shown interest in particular kinds of books. By early 2012, the company had an office in Santa Monica, California, and 6 million registered members, about 18 months after raising $2 million in venture funding.⁠[3][1][1][1]

From February 5, 2010, Goodreads traffic from Iran fell sharply, and the company concluded that the site had been blocked by the Iranian authorities. At the time Goodreads had about 3 million members worldwide, including more than 114,000 in Iran, its largest non-English-speaking group.⁠[5][5][5]

On March 10, 2011, Goodreads announced the acquisition of the book recommendation company Discovereads.com, using its machine learning algorithms to analyze 100 million ratings from its then 4.6 million users to generate personalized recommendations and to improve its interest-targeted book advertising. Discovereads had been developed over three years by chief executive Kyusik Chung and Brian Percival, who had left an electrical engineering PhD program at Stanford. After the recommendation engine was added, the number of titles users added to their reading lists rose by 60%.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][1]

On January 20, 2012, Otis Chandler announced that from January 30 Goodreads would no longer display Amazon-sourced data such as titles, author names, page counts, and publication dates, because the terms attached to Amazon’s data had become increasingly restrictive; Goodreads switched to importing data from other sources (including a database of 14 million ISBNs) and launched tools for volunteer “librarians” to fill gaps, while members’ ratings, reviews, and shelves were unaffected.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7]

On March 28, 2013, Amazon announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire Goodreads; terms were not disclosed, and the deal was expected to close in the second quarter of that year. At the time Goodreads had more than 16 million members and more than 30,000 book clubs, and its headquarters would remain in San Francisco after the acquisition. Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president for Kindle content, said both companies shared a passion for reinventing reading; Otis Chandler said the partnership would let Goodreads bring its experience to millions of readers worldwide faster.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8]

The deal was controversial in the book industry. The Authors Guild called it a “truly devastating act of vertical integration,” and its president, the author Scott Turow, argued that Amazon had eliminated the possibility of Goodreads becoming a competing online bookseller or an independent venue for reviews; at least one author welcomed the deal. Chandler said Goodreads had no plans to change the user experience.⁠[9][9][9][9][9]

On July 23, 2013, Goodreads announced that it had reached 20 million members, up from 10 million eleven months earlier; members had written more than 25 million reviews and added more than 620 million books to their shelves.⁠[10][10]

In June 2016 Goodreads released a beta of its new desktop homepage, with faster loading, larger covers, updates and discussions merged into a single endlessly scrolling feed, and the Currently Reading shelf and annual Reading Challenge given more prominent positions.⁠[11][11][11][11]

On April 25, 2019, Otis and Elizabeth Chandler announced that at the end of May they would step back as chief executive officer and editor-in-chief and become advisors; Veronica Moss, who had led revenue and operations for four years, became chief executive officer. They wrote that Goodreads had grown from an idea started in their living room in 2006 into a community of more than 90 million readers, to which they had devoted 13 years.⁠[12][12][12][12]

On July 14, 2025, Goodreads began rolling out a new logo: a lowercase “g” incorporating a magnifying glass over an open book, symbolizing book discovery and the sharing of perspectives. At the same time, the annual Reading Challenge added rotating limited-time achievements throughout the year; U.S. users who link their Goodreads and Amazon accounts can see their Want to Read list in Amazon’s Your Books feature; and the catalog added more than one million audiobooks.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13]

On Goodreads, users can see what books their friends are reading, track books they are reading, have read, and want to read, get personalized recommendations, and read community reviews; its recommendation engine analyzes 20 billion data points. Goodreads describes itself as the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations, with a mission to help readers discover books they love and get more out of reading.⁠[3][3][3]

Through the Goodreads Author Program, authors can claim their author pages, receive a verified badge, an author dashboard, and book statistics, and interact directly with readers through Ask the Author. As of September 2023, Goodreads had more than 150 million members; in early 2022 it had 125 million users.⁠[14][14][4]

Goodreads holds the annual reader-voted Goodreads Choice Awards; the 2025 awards received 7,516,397 votes.⁠[15][15]

Goodreads: Official website: https://www.goodreads.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

X: Public account: https://x.com/goodreads (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/goodreads-com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]