Goodreads Expands Their Book Database With More German-Langauge Titles
Amazon launched a new publishing imprint in Germany on Wednesday but that’s not all they did. The Amazon-owned book community Goodreads will soon be adding also signed a deal to add more German-language titles to its database.
Goodreads has arranged for finished negotiating with the German book and ebook distributor Books on Demand to provide a data feed to GR, and Goodreads will shortly be adding that service’s catalog of 45,000 titles to the Goodreads database, where they can be searched for by GR members and added to a member’s virtual bookshelves.
This latest deal comes as part of a renewed effort by Goodreads to expand the coverage of their database, and to better server their international members. The site is now claiming 25 million members from around the globe, including Germany.
According to their FAQ:
Goodreads is striving to be a complete database of all published works, including works that are out-of-print. We like our members to be able to add their exact edition to their virtual shelves. Just as a library would not remove a record from its catalog, so do we not remove books from our database.
This has lately led to some rather interesting situations.
In addition to expanding the catalog with data from book distributors, Goodreads is also adding more entries based on metadata sourced from Amazon. Unfortunately whoever was in charge of importing the Amazon data wasn’t quite as careful as they could be. I’m told that a lot of non-book content was mixed in, including some issues of Maxim magazine as well as other paper goods like post cards, calendars, and stationery.
Goodreads is in the process of removing those titles, but until they do so GR members can amuse themselves by adding postcards to their TBR piles.
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