Goodreads has attracted considerable attention — and controversy — for recent moves to limit readers and authors attacking each other on their site. In simplest form, Goodreads is getting stricter about removing reviews that “primarily…talk about author behavior” in a negative way. One of the primary objections from members was that the site acted unilaterally, without any prior notification, in removing reviews that were judged as violating the site’s guidelines from member pages.
In their most recent note, Goodreads claimed that their actions so far were limited to only 21 members so far. At the same time, they have realized: “In retrospect, we absolutely should have given users notice that our policies were changing before taking action on the items that were flagged. To the 21 members who were impacted: we’d like to sincerely apologize for jumping the gun on this. It was a mistake on our part, and it should not have happened.”
In the lengthy comments section, many members complained about being criticized by authors. Goodreads says they will enforce their author rules strictly. “We do not tolerate authors attacking or harassing reviewers on the site. This violates our author guidelines and authors who engage in this type of behavior will be removed from the site. We are simply asking that you flag the content to staff’s attention rather than responding to inappropriate behavior in the review space.”
And in a reported email, Goodreads has also acknowledged, “It’s clear that some of the problems have come up because authors who are new to Goodreads don’t always know what’s appropriate on Goodreads. Some of them have been too aggressive in their self-promotion. We’ve taken steps to help educate them better and we are moderating more aggressively.”
The Goodreads blog has tried to address the shades of gray in their policies: “Some people are perhaps interpreting this as you can’t discuss the author at all. This couldn’t be further from the case. The author is a part of the book and can certainly be discussed in relation to the book. But it has to be in a way that’s relevant to the book. Again, let’s judge books based on what’s inside them.
“Some people are concerned about their ‘not-interested’ shelf or variants of that. We are not deleting those; you are free to keep cataloging books that way. We are deleting shelves like ‘author-is-a-jerk’, as they don’t fit our guiding principle that the book page be about the book.”
At the same time, Goodreads has employed some corporate double-speak — describing the changes, while insisting that they aren’t a change; and parsing words (“we haven’t deleted any book reviews in regard to this issue. The key word here is ‘book'”) — that has also irritated some members.
More seriously, multiple members report having harmless shelvings of theirs was removed. One posted: “I can’t stop laughing. Goodreads deleted my harry potter books….. they were all five stars ratings.”
In a timely move, we have Goodreads ceo Otis Chandler speaking at our big Publishers Launch Frankfurt conference on Tuesday, October 8 — co-presented with the Frankfurt Academy. Other in-the-news speakers include Charlie Redmayne in his first trade speech since taking over Harper UK; Nielsen Book president Jonathan Nowell, speaking right after the close of their acquisition of some of Bowker’s business lines; and Wattpad ceo Alan Lau right after the announcement of their publishing program with Sourcebooks. Another company on the program will have a big announcement in about a week, and our full roster of top-level executives also includes Amazon Kindle executive Russ Grandinetti.