Most people aren&#x27;t active readers. Goodreads users are active readers. Amazon bought Goodreads (and other sites like Shelfari) because that&#x27;s where the readers are.<p>I read 74 books so far this year. Most of them were purchased from Amazon.<p>Also, Goodreads has an active review community, and good &quot;by reader&quot; data for recommendations (as opposed to Amazon&#x27;s &quot;by account&quot; data. If Amazon were smart, they&#x27;d be working very hard on improving recommendations with their Goodreads data.