Authors irked by Amazon

Authors' group says Amazon is gaining too much control in publishing industry with its purchase of Goodreads, a book-review site

Amazon.com (AMZN) is gaining too much control in the publishing industry with its purchase of Goodreads, a social network for readers and a competitor in online book reviews, an authors' group says.

Goodreads, which allows users to add titles to virtual bookshelves and track what friends are reading, has 16 million members who have written more than 23 million reviews, Amazon said in a March 28 statement. The company said the deal will probably close in the second quarter and didn't provide terms.

The site had potential to become an Internet bookseller to compete with Amazon, the largest online retailer, Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild, said in an online post last week. Amazon began as an online bookseller in 1995 and is seeking to spur virtual book sales through its Kindle e-readers. As readers shift to digital content, publishers have said Amazon devalues content with low prices that make it hard for them to compete.

"Recommendations from like-minded readers appear to be the Holy Grail of online book marketing," says Turow, whose legal thrillers include The Burden of Proof and Presumed Innocent. "By combining Goodreads' recommendation database with Amazon's own vast databases of readers' purchase histories, Amazon's control of online bookselling approaches the insurmountable."