Goodreads Adds Automatic Sync with Amazon Book Purchases
Goodreads has just announced another reason for Amazon customers to use the site.
The online book community, which Amazon acquired last year, is now enabling readers to automatically sync their Amazon book purchases with their Goodreads account. The new feature is being slowly rolled out to Goodreads users and it is currently limited to only the US,Canada, and Australia, but Goodreads plans to expand availability in the future.
Readers will be able to see all of the books they purchased via Amazon, including both paper and digital, books purchased from third-party sellers but not ebooks purchased from Amazon’s original ebookstore (those sales records are gone, I’m told). They can assign them ratings and add titles to to their bookshelves, or not. I’m told the import option will also let readers exclude titles that they don’t wish to publicize.
This feature is not widely available, and in fact I don’t have the option yet. According to the comments left by Goodreads reps on their blog post, that is because they are rolling this out incrementally.
If you’re interested in giving it a go, you can check the My Books page. The option will be listed in the menu on the left – if it is available. If you don’t see the option and you want to import your purchases, you can force the issue here:
https://www.goodreads.com/amazon_purchases
I just clicked the link and went through the process, and I must say that I am relieved that the books aren’t being added automatically. I have to rate or shelve each title before it will be added to my Goodreads profile, and that’s a good thing because my mother shares my Kindle account. She has a very different taste in books than I.
Ever since Amazon bought Goodreads last year the retailer has been integrating the social network more closely with its bookstore. Late last year Amazon rolled out an update for the Kindle Paperwhite which added Goodreads integration, including the option to rate and review books.
The site now boasts 25 million members who added 294 million titles to their virtual bookshelves in 2013.
Comments
Jesslynh April 16, 2014 um 6:28 pm
I did the PeeWee Herman dance all around my living room when I saw this integration. Not only did it point me to a few books that I read too fast to make it on my GR list, it imported them in the correct format (Kindle). One of my biggest peeves about GR, is that I can’t set Kindle to be my default book format and end up with a bunch of Hardcovers in my list.
Hopefully Audible books are next–I like to match each ebook with its audio version if I can….
Nate Hoffelder April 16, 2014 um 6:41 pm
Audible integration would be a good next step, yes.
Greg Strandberg April 16, 2014 um 11:02 pm
Wow, maybe this will give Amazon a chance to update their Author Central News – March 28, 2013, is a bit old.
Goodreads Expands Automatic Amazon Sync to Include the UK – The Digital Reader May 13, 2014 um 10:39 am
[…] launched about a month ago, this feature enables Goodreads members to automatically sync their Amazon accounts with their […]
Joel Argo January 27, 2015 um 11:15 pm
I have over 800 amazon kindle books I would like to add to Goodreads. Doing it one by one is not going to happen. I’ve been searching the web for a solution and thousands and thousands of pages of not what I want to do is not helping. I’ll post the question here: HTH do I do a full sync without having to check every single item?
Nate Hoffelder, The Digital Reader January 28, 2015 um 7:08 am
I do not know, sorry.