The demise of our beloved Goodreads flows from Amazon’s neglect and limitations

The demise of Goodreads?

How can that be at a moment when the global service for book lovers seeming to be more robust than ever, at least from the self-reported totals of as many as 150 million members, today?

The key is the word “service.” Its founders, Otis and Elizabth Chandler, envisioned Goodreads as a community of friends who could freely share their reading—and even an index of their entire libraries—with each other. At its peak, we had the fun of discussing individual books as well as comparing what we had collected—and hoped to collect—for our library shelves. However, when they sold their online community to Amazon for an estimated $150 million in 2008, Amazon’s eyes were on the Chandlers’ millions of dedicated users in the hopes of turning this book-reviewing service into an adjunct to its own so-called “community” of product reviewers.

That’s when the “neglect” began with Amazon stubbornly refusing to upgrade a whole host of software pillars that built this community—followed by the gradual trimming of Goodreads community resources that didn’t fit with a reviewing service.

As I write this, I’m not angry. I have plenty of other global outlets to write about books and other issues in media, including journalism. I’m writing this column, sad to say, to honor—and mourn with you as readers—this once-great community. We’re posting this also to explain to our authors why, as publishers, we are concluding that Goodreads is in a downward spiral largely due to Amazon’s seemingly deliberate neglect. 

Our publishing house team once had sincere affection for this true community where so many of us enjoyed “logging in” each day to celebrate reading and discuss new-and-old books with friends. In fact, I still tell people the story of how excited I was 18 years ago to be among the first million to join Goodreads in February 2008. That was just a year after it was publicly launched by the Chandlers as a pet project they dreamed up among their real-world friends. Almost immediatly, I was meeting old friends and discussing the books we love.

But, let’s get a second opinion—

So that I could speak more broadly for our publishing house leadership team, I asked for thoughts from our Marketing Director Susan Stitt. Susan ranks among the top book-marketing experts nationally after her many years of working with authors. When asked about Goodreads, she says:

Not that many years ago, Goodreads had real potential as a gathering place for readers and authors, as I promoted it in this 2018 FEP column. Sadly, in the last few years it’s been on a slow fade and is no longer on the “short list” of recommended social media platforms for authors we represent.

Goodreads has suffered from a lack of meaningful investment by Amazon, and it shows: buggy functionality, unchecked spam reviews, and an sluggish interface that feels like a time capsule. For publishers, the tools that once made Goodreads worth the effort—especially giveaways and author pages—have either been monetized into near-uselessness or simply ignored. Much like the limitations Amazon placed on its Author pages not too long ago, the Goodreads changes have not considered the negative impacts felt by authors and their readers.

For our titles—books that speak to people of faith, civic engagement, and thoughtful reflection—our readers spend their time on Facebook, reading our Read the Spirit weekly email newsletter, or our authors’ own emailed newsletters via lots of other services, including Substack or Tertulia. The lesson for independent and mission-driven publishers isn’t just that Goodreads has declined; it’s that the reading community is now more fragmented than it was just a few years ago.

Raising questions—

Ask around the Internet and you’ll find that Goodreads remains the massive elephant in the living room. Amazon reports that it still has more than 150 million members around the world.

However, that number seems surprising to many long-time Goodreads users. That’s because of the ever-rising tide of journalists, authors, publishers and everyday readers who have been complaining for a couple of years.

Some say (in places like Reddit) that this online lament started with a December 2023 article in The Guardian, dramatically headlined: “It’s totally unhinged”—is the book world turning against Goodreads? Others credit a widely read New York Times article in 2023 headlined: How Review-Bombing Can Tank a Book Before It’s Published.

Then, after the last presidential election, there was fresh buzz online about readers and authors leaving Goodreads—focusing on anger over Jeff Bezos’s involvement in that election. Here’s one example: A Canadian news report just after the election in late 2024.

That led to a fresh wave of posts—like this one from Old Town Books in Alexandria, Virginia or this one from an active online book influencer who goes by “Bunny.” Those are just two of many examples. Most of those 2025 posts urged book-lovers to migrate to other services such as StoryGraph. However, this was hardly a tidal wave. StoryGraph has about 5 million members and lots of limitations as well.

Why this skeptical journalist was slow to join these waves—

Our publishing house was founded by journalists, both active and former journalists, and we’re skeptics as a part of our professional discipline. So, throughout 2024, as the founding Editor of Front Edge and a journalist with half a century of experience in American media, I devoted a lot of time to Goodreads. I kicked off the year with this enthusiastic invitation to our friends: Come visit us on Goodreads! We’re back for another year in 2024. Susan and I both included our personal Goodreads links in that column.

Now, in this column, I do want to thank a couple dozen friends who accepted that invitation and interacted with me as I posted an average of 2 new reviews per week for 52 weeks.

However, for me, one of the tragedies in Amazon’s management was the decision to “turn off” options for Goodreads users to directly communicate with each other and to more robustly illustrate their content. The “direct message” service was officially shut down as 2026 started, but there had been lots of bugs and other annoying limitations as early as 2023 and 2024. For example, some of the most popular writers on Goodreads enjoyed curating their reviews and other messages with images and links to learn more. That was a delightful part of our interactions, in my own experience. But from the initial “spotty” troubles—through the official end of such services—we collectively felt a slap in the face from our hosts. I know a good number of true book lovers who spent hours adding “extras” to their reviews, touching on cultural or historical or religious or literary moments that we all enjoyed.

With these limitations piling up, logging into Goodreads became a whole lot more like logging into the Amazon reviewing community—where I remain very active, by the way. Goodreads once had been more like a beloved neighborhood of friends. Amazon reviewing has always been more a matter of pure business, which probably is what the Bezos team prefers at Goodreads.

So, this column becomes our “Coda” to that widely read “Come visit us” column focusing on our high hopes for 2024.

And it’s a voice of shared lament that this gathering place for old friends seems to have vanished.

May we all devote ourselves to more regular reading and sharing of what we can control: For us, that’s our weekly Front Edge Publishing columns and our weekly ReadTheSpirit.com online magazine. Please sign up for our free weekly emails that send along our fresh headlines—and our weekly invitations to let us know what you’re thinking!

We are a real community, here.