Regarding the 2013 Amazon acquisition of Goodreads, The New York Times said that: "Goodreads was a rival to Amazon as a place for discovering books" and that this deal "consolidates Amazon's power to determine which authors get exposure for their work". It did not give me much more than that. But yes, I have seen the bloggers, I have seen the podcasters built up a big enough audience to then parley that into book sales. Andrew: Definitely, alright, well end it there. Otis and Elizabeth Chandler are founders of Goodreads. You can follow us on Twitter @HowIBuiltThis, on Instagram @HowIBuiltThisNPR and email us at hibt@npr.org. So we can really decide if this is the right company for us. So, you can kind of think of it as a virtual bookshelf. Are you a designer? Even if you get published by Harper Collins or Manninghouse, great theyre going to put your book in the Barnes & Noble store but, theyre not going to market beyond that. So what we had is we animated on this fun, plus serious model and I think at the end we had maybe 600 fun tests and maybe 150 serious tests, and the serious tests we eventually figured out we could sell a result to these. Thats huge. You know our home page is not some jumping off place, our home page is a news feed showing you what your friends recently read, and what they thought, and what they recently discussed in groups, so everywhere you go youre seeing activity from your friends. Andrew: I see. Along with a passion for building websites, hes also a voracious reader. Dorothy Buffum Chandler died last summer and her son Otis Chandler, who at one time ran both Times Mirror Co. and the flagship Los Angeles Times newspaper, stepped down from the board after 36 years. [73] A form of extortion scam known as "review bombing", in which trolls post numerous 1-star ratings and poor reviews on an author's new book from different sock-puppet accounts to make the book look bad (sometimes demanding money or that the author quit Goodreads usage to stop the bad reviews from coming in), has also been widely reported as a growing form of bullying on Goodreads, targeting both traditional and self-published authors. Which were very passionate about. Heres the interview. . So he came up with the current look and feel of most of it. Goodreads is an American social cataloging website and a subsidiary of Amazon[1] that allows individuals to search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews. The site has since grown to nearly 5 million members who have added over 150 million books, completely by word of mouth. Its only about a week and a half old, but its pretty exciting for us. Alright, lets go back to when you were at Stanford. You know for us we had a problem where Goodreads was about cataloging your books so you come in and youd add a bunch of books and youd say what you thought of them, and maybe youd go kind of nuts. [17] During its first year of business, the company was run without any formal funding. You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. [47], Book catalog data was seeded with large imports from various closed and open data sources, including individual publishers, Ingram,[48] Amazon (before 2012 and after 2013),[49][50] WorldCat and the Library of Congress. [23] In October 2012, Goodreads announced it had grown to 11 million members with 395 million books cataloged and over 20,000 book clubs created by its users. Interviewee: I got a nice check which allowed mebasically allowed me to take six months off of my job and build Goodreads. [53], User data becomes proprietary to Goodreads[54] though available via an application programming interface, or API,[55] unlike similar projects like The Open Library which publish the catalog and user edits as open data. He was the fourth and final member of the Chandler family to hold the paper's top position. You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. Otis and Elizabeth Chandler are founders of Goodreads. And, if youre on the site and you have no friends, then everywhere you go its saying you have no friends whove read this book, add some friends. And yet, a funny thing that he said about business school: He said Dont go to business school, and you go James, you went to business school. Eventually, it gained attention through the media such as Mashable and other various blogs. Interviewee: I think you can and theres certainly examples of guys whove done that. I was a Saint Bernard because Im loyal. Interviewee: And I could see social networking was probably going to do the same. Popular fantasy novelist Rin Chupeco has noted that authors from marginalized groups are often a target, and she also criticized the minimalist approach Goodreads takes to moderation, saying, "Goodreads only removes reviews that specifically target the author, but they do not do that for every book, eitherjust for the authors with big enough marketing and publicity teams to demand these removals." Andrew: Okay, great. Thank you everyone for watching, Im looking forward to your comments and Im looking forward to talking to, actually Im looking forward to your comments lets leave it there. So if you took a 40 question test about your personality wed give you one page about what it meant for free and then wed give you 15 pages about deep psychological analysis coming from our PhD psychologist about what exactly it means for your personality and how you can improve your life, and we would actually sale those for between $4.99 to $9.99 depending on the test so there was a little bit of direct consumer revenue there. Reply Quote. Thanks. Goodreads often refuses to remove quotes with "likes" from an author's profile, even if the quotes are false or invalid. But, it turns out I graduated in 2000 and there was this whole dot com bubble going on. Otis Chandler has made 2 investments. [67] Goodreads has also fallen under criticism from users who feel that the site is outdated and prone to frequent crashes and bugs, and that the recommendations are poor, frequently suggesting popular books at random rather than anything more personalized. Last week, O'Reilly GM and publisher Joe Wikert reviewed Goodreads' CEO Otis Chandler's TOC session, in which Chandler presented the results of a recent Goodreads readers survey.One of the interesting pieces from the survey covered the effectiveness of Goodreads reviews. Am I reading your history properly here? Research help from Claire Murashima. Is it going to increase our user retention? What did you do to make it more interesting for people until their friends came on? Andrew: How can you decide which ideas you listen to? Andrew: What else worked well? Talk to them a couple months later after the books been on the shelves for a while, they are so depressed they dont even want to talk about the book anymore. But I think, you know, my sense is from talking to authors that thats kind of becoming more of what they have to do. If they were black, theyd go to a black dating site. No, I get those emails from you. So shes really been into the product and we kind of view it as both of ours a little bit. I mean I was totally the kid that disassembled every mechanical piece in our house when I was young. Andrew: Alright, and you talked about compelling content. Blogger or WordPress, whatever. If the product is going to be viral it has to be more useful if there are friends then if there are not. Thank you. Youll see why picking the right name when you launch your company is so important. Should I go outsource to India or whatever? Im like no, just get a good engineer, get a smart guy out of college, give him a large piece of your company, make him your right hand man and go build something before you do anything and prove that it works. I probably said I wanted to be a mechanical engineer and build cars someday. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. And in thinking that way, I realized wow, books are kinda broken on the internet. [Andrew Laughs] And I took a few CS classes two CS classes at standford. The scion of the wealthy Chandler family who took over the Los Angeles Times and transformed it into a nationally respected publication. Youll learn how he did it in this interview. And it also depends on the author. And Goodreads, before it got any outside funding, it was him, just building this thing up. Andrew: Thats kind of interesting that the next big trend to come out I wonder if instead of trying to copy the big company, we can niche it out and focus on a specific area that we might have a morea bigger chance of succeeding. Andrew: Funny how many people who went to business school would say the same thing. [37] Once users have added friends to their profile, they will see their friends' shelves and reviews and can comment on friends' pages. And theres a lot ofpretty much everybodys building a social network these days. Thanks Otis. Thats actually one thing publishers look for in an author, is do they have a way to market it? Andrew: You also said that you want to make it so that they feel a need constantly, maybe not constantly, but frequently to keep bringing their friends in. As a young programmer in the mid-2000s, Otis Chandler watched as dozens of niche web sites began to take off. Interviewee: I think so. Hey everyone, its Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambition upstart. Goodreads CEO & founder Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler Editor & Chief run a social reading site that offers book reviews and a place to discover new books to read, based in part by. But I was really excited to learn this hot new language called Ruby on Rails. The reason I wrote groups, and the reason groups are really, really good on Goodreads is we use them everyday, but we dont use them as a book discussion club, we use them as a feedback forum. I got that book for my Kindle, I love it. It had a news feed before Facebook did. Now he gets the same write-up and nothing happens. Andrew: We might need to start something like that. [42] By 2011, "seventeen thousand authors, including James Patterson and Margaret Atwood" used Goodreads to advertise.[4]. Goodreads is pleased to announce the release of KINDLR, an exciting new dating app exclusively for Goodreads members. Can you talk about some of the things that you did over at, and for the transcribers its tickle.com T-I-C-K-L-E.com, can you talk about some of the viral techniques that you used there? They were too serious. And by helping them I mean actively getting them into the press and spending money, marketing money, to promote the book. Interviewee: Yeah, its looking good. You know the Sci-Fi and Fantasy group on Goodreads is one of my favorites, those guys are just amazing, and theres so much discussion going on, and theres so much excitement going around all the books that people are reading. [41], The website facilitates reader interactions with authors through the interviews, giveaways, authors' blogs, and profile information. Otis Chandler - San Francisco, CA (1,354 books) 585 ratings (4.19 avg) 385 reviews Goodreads Founder more photos (7) #32 most followed #3 top librarians Otis Chandler Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Otis. "My mom taught me to read with flashcards when I was 2," Chandler says. So giving users the ability to do that means you can use it without your friends being on there. Luckily the guy who had Goodreads.com with an s sold it to me otherwise Im not sure if it would have taken off like it did. Elizabeth Chandler @Elizabethkhuri 25 Apr 2019 After 13 years of growing Goodreads from an idea to a community with more than 90 million members, Otis and I are moving on our next chapter. Doing that process helps you think, okay well heres a feature that would be really cool and maybe its going to really increase user retention but its not going to help us at all with revenue or getting new traffic, so maybe its not as important as this other idea which is going to really make us money and increase retention, or this other idea which is going to get us new traffic and increase retention. Or even the Google AdWords self-serve product in that its cost-per-click based. After university Chandler initially worked as a programmer in on-line businesses,[11] including dating sites,[12] and Khuri Chandler as a journalist. X. . We built a dating site right on the heels of match.com. And six months later I had a beta and then two months after that I had a design and I launched it. But it got me to learn HTML and SQL which were important, cause it got me into the web. Many of his most prized pieces had already been sold, including his 1894 Baldwin steam locomotive and his beloved Porsche 917 racecars. Some authors have suggested that Goodreads take a stricter approach to public review postings in the same manner that Amazon has done in the past, such as requiring a telephone number, a verified account by email address, and a real name before any account-holder can post public ratings or reviews. Interviewee: So we launched it, I think, in December of 2006. So Tickle was viral because when you took a test it would say compare your result with your friends and it was kind of like an early social network in that there were friends except the only thing we did with them was when you took a test was show you Okay youre a Saint Bernard, and heres your friend Andrew whos a Golden Retriever, and heres your other friend Olivia whos a Pug or something like that. So then they started going to these niche sites. Mark (unclear) was here, and I asked him if hed recommend business school to other people and he said No, theres so many better ways to waste your money than that. Scroll below and check more details information about Current Net worth as well as Monthly/Year Salary, Expense, Income Reports! But most of them are guys who published a book or self-published a book and theyre trying to figure out How am I going to market my book to people? And this is the biggest problem that authors are facing right now. I had never read Sherlock Holmes. Interviewee: Yeah, I had basic stock options. Or the most hardcore booklovers. Thank you everyone. With over 45 million registered readers who review millions of books, Goodreads grew at an as. When he decided to launch his own site just for book lovers, a respected colleague told him there was "probably not a very big market there." Otis figured he might prove him wrong, and in 2007, launched Goodreads, a book catalog and review site that he coded from his LA apartment. The book misses some opportunities to delve deeper into . Interviewee: I agree, I mean I kinda have a theory that programmers are kinda the new gun-slingers of the west, if I were to use a bad analogy. Critics of Goodreads have considered this decision to be a form of censorship. Profile Name: Otis Chandler Age: 31 Company: Goodreads.com Title: CEO and president First job: Ranch hand in Montana Bookselling in the future will be "all about using the Internet and free e . In relation to Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, 58% of surveyed readers said they . Or do what Ning did and allow people to create small niches. I cant imagine what the next thing is going to be. I dont know. Interviewee: So, the founder, James [?] Andrew: How are they doing that? The New York Times noted that Goodreads, at the time of the acquisition, had a more reputable reviewing system than Amazon's. [52] Goodreads librarians coordinate on the Goodreads Librarian Group. I should have gone for Mix Energy or Mix Synergy. Yea, that was what got me into the web. And it turns out that most problems in mechanical engineering are pretty solved. [39] Goodreads also offers quizzes and trivia, quotations, book lists, and free giveaways. His soon-to-be-wife Elizabeth joined the project, and they slowly built a followingwithout an office, a business model, or a single employee. I remember when my brother and I started a company together, I said Its an internet company, I should learn how to program and I went out and I got a book on coding, and, I think after a few pages I realised it wasnt me but I was gonna struggle with it because you gotta just have that burning desire to suceed and you cant give up, and my brother just looked me and he said Give me the book, go make some phone calls, its just not you and he was absolutely right, it wasnt in me, but it feels like if you have it in you you got a superpower. Thats the hard part of being down here in Buenos Aires. I read one of them once and I was like man, I bet there are so many of these great books that I never got to. Dave Yenk, again, Im reading everyones twitter names here, hes saying, Youd think that Goodreads would allow authors an easy way to get in front of their target niche, Im guessing is what he means. So they finally got an idea that went big, it was just because it was something that was fun. Sign In http://www.twitter.com/otown https://www.goodreads.com/otis Otis's favorite books More Otis's Bookshelves read (577) Social book cataloging website owned by Amazon, Learn how and when to remove this template message, published under a different name before coming out, "Amazon to Buy Social Site Dedicated to Sharing Books", "Book lovers seething over Amazon acquisition of Goodreads", "Elizabeth Khuri Chandler Tells the Origin Story of Goodreads", "Need Advice on What to Read? Thanks for liking this post. I say Okay theres a lot of users here that are really, really wanting this or that, and then I can prioritize what were going to build. Can you talk about that? One of the sites we built, that photo-sharing site I mentioned, was called ringo.com. He is from USA. Andrew: Alright, Ive got to tell you too I looked at one of your latest reads, the book by Tessla, and I said well, Tessla wrote a book, how interesting could it be. What else did you do that was different and that helped spur on virility? It just seemed like there was a lot more innovation going on. Do you have a group on Goodreads thats like that? Andrew: I remember one of the things we talked about, you spoke at a live Mixergy event about how to build virility into your product and you said that when a user registers youd ask them for their friends immediately, right? His net worth has been growing significantly in 2021-2022. I dont think it worked. The rest of us get a nice check. Interviewee: I think he hired smart people, and like you said, smart people want to work with smart people, and that just kind of grows. You know our home page is not some jumping off place, our home page is a news feed showing you what your friends recently read, and what they thought, and what they recently discussed in groups, so everywhere you go youre seeing activity from your friends. Otis Chandler succeeded his father as the paper's publisher in 1960 and held that post for 20 years, though Norman Chandler remained an executive with the company until his death in 1974. You can spend hours on there. So, from that perspective, absolutely, it was life-changing. Interviewee: For one, I didnt feel like getting another job. If its not you focus on the part of the business that you know and get a rock star engineer. Nobody ever knows what Im talking about when I say, Mixergy. [21] The New Yorker's Macy Halford noted that the algorithm was not perfect, as the number of books needed to create a perfect recommendation system is so large that "by the time I'd got halfway there, my reading preferences would have changed and I'd have to start over again. Its all about (muffled) testing. [13] Chandler and Khuri both grew up in California. And then what wins goes first, and then you try another one. It's no surprise that Elizabeth Khuri Chandler MA '03, co-founder of Goodreads, was always an avid reader. And you just track as much as you can and then better it. were creating profiles, and I said weve got to make these guys special. So realitys about making things really dead simple for the user. Net Worth in 2022: $1 Million - $5 Million: Salary in . Him on everywhere else? So much depends on being able to get stuff done, and engineers are the only guys who can get stuff done, so yeah, they have a lot of power in todays internet company. Then I read your review of it and you said, This guy can write. Youre a great reviewer by the way. Goodreads has tried to address this, implementing rules such as only allowing reviewers to criticize a book itself, not author behaviour or political affiliations. And you look at how many people come in and how many invites get sent and how many people can make it to the end. Hes talking to fans and hes got big followings on all those services. The easier you make things for users, the better; so if you tell them: Youve got to do a bunch of work to find your friends and send these test results to you, theyre not going to do as much. When he decided to launch his own site just for book lovers, a respected colleague told him there was "probably not a very big market there.". [70] And not work. Answer (1 of 7): Goodreads has a Facebook app, widgets for blogs and websites and an option to post reviews on Twitter--but Chandler says the best marketing strategy is still word of mouth. Go buy a yacht? Dont go. So Im glad I didnt do it. It depends on, again, on the book. Goodreads founder Otis Chandler said that "his management team would remain in place to guard the reviewing process" with the acquisition. Before founding Goodreads, Otis was a Software Engineer and Product Manager at Tickle.com. Andrew: Was it about the, the Was it about the businesses that were being built out of nothing that excited you? Nothing big. You know theyd spend half a work day going down memory lane, all the books I read in junior high, all the books I read in high school, and its a kind of fun process to go through actually. A lot of engineers just like thinking about code and I can understand that, so if youre an engineer who likes just thinking about code maybe you need your left hand man who can go think about business, like you and your brother. A person whos an engineer who wants to develop, who wants to think about engineering problems, and not financial problems. 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