Good Reads: the pros and cons of selling to Amazon

So… I went to London for the launch of Art of War yesterday and came home to the news that Good Reads had been sold to Amazon. I posted my horror on Facebook and one of my friends - a very wonderful tech-savvy, powerful woman - posted this:

Why is this a bad thing? Honest question.
These are things I know:
-Good reads is good, but could be SO MUCH BETTER with more engineering / backing and some basic improvements.
-Amazon is a great place to buy books, and I thought they werent entirely evil (I could be wrong) but I dont find their reviews to be very social, and I often make reading decisions based on recommendations.
-I know I am an early adopter etc, but I often send myself kindle samples and purchase books at ease and the easier this process is, the more likely I am to read/spend more.

All of which is fair point. Good Reads will doubtless become more slick, and may help sell more books and as an author, anything AT ALL which reaches more people has to be A Good Thing.

but

The huge value of Good Reads to me as a *reader* was that it wasn’t a slick operation trying to sell me books, it was the place I could go where people with no axe to grind, said what they thought about the books they had read. Amazon may once have been that, but the marketeers and masters of the art of sock puppetry have taken it over. For those not in the know, the ‘sock puppet’ is when Author A takes on another identity and then posts on his or her own books - usually of the ‘I’ve never come across this author before, but my goodness, doesn’t it blow all of the competition out of the water?!!!!!?!!!1111222 OMG’ etc, etc, devolving into lolspeak with every deteriorating sentence. When they think they’re being caught out at this, they go one step down and start ‘liking’ the bad comments made by other people and ‘disliking’ the good ones in order to make the book look worse than it is. (and it’s a truth universally acknowledged, that ordinary people only make the effort to go onto Amazon for the books they love or the ones they hate. Middle stars are given by people with an agenda)

There are a number of obvious issues with this, starting with the fact that it’s quite hard to cover your tracks and anyone even barely computer literate can find out who you are in roughly 30 seconds, and if that person has a big media lawyer behind them, and you’ve not only bigged up your own books, but bone onto other people’s streams and slagged them off ‘This is OK, but not a patch on Author A’ then you may find yourself answering difficult legal questions. (and yes, some of my friends and colleagues do care enough to hire the big media lawyers to hunt these puppets down).

More sad still, is the fact that these people see each other as rivals, when anyone with a modicum of sense knows that if Authors A and Z write roughly in the same style, for the same patch of the market, they are, in fact, each others’ closest allies. If I love author A, I am very likely also to love author Z and will not care tuppence for the minor differences in style. It may take a year to write a book, but I can (and often do) read them from one end to the other in the course of two train journeys - into London and back out again - and then if I like it, I want more of the same.

So if we take this back to Good Reads which was a kind of universal book club where ordinary people wrote what they thought, then that, I think, is about to die. It’ll go the way of the Book Depository - remember that? - the place people like me bought books on line because it *wasn’t* Amazon. So Amazon bought it up, so we stopped buying books there. I can’t remember the last time I even noticed it was selling books. Doubtless it’s lovely and slick and has exactly the same trading terms as Amazon -but that’s not going to fool anyone for very long.

All power to the people who set up Good Reads and are now rolling in dosh, and perhaps I’ll be able to have dual author identity now for MC Scott as well as Manda Scott - but I remain to be convinced that this is anything other than a crippling of integrity.