When Goodreads' Otis Chandler says, “Status is important to me,” he's not referring to his legendary family lineage—his namesake grandfather was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times for two decades—but to the Web site feature that tells him what his friends are reading and discussing on Goodreads.com, Chandler's Internet venture that's now home to 2.3 million users who share a passion for the written word.
Since childhood, Chandler has embodied the two essentials for creating a literary tool for the computer age: technology and books. “I always knew I'd be an engineer because I was one of those kids who loved how things worked, but I was also one that had a love of books very early on.” After graduating with an engineering degree from Stanford in 2000, he went to work at Tickle.com, a personality-testing Web site in Silicon Valley. Chandler stayed there for six years as a senior software engineer and product manager. “My baby was the dating service,” he says. “It evolved to include photo sharing and a social networking service.”
Chandler learned every aspect of emerging Web sites while at Tickle.com, from sales and marketing to how to position and design a site, and launched Goodreads in 2006. “I built it to be used by everybody, but I also built it for myself because I wanted it to exist,” Chandler explains. “There's no social interactivity around Amazon's 'wish lists' for books, and I wanted to see what my friends were reading.” Goodreads allows and encourages its users to catalogue, rate and blog about the books they are reading, and offers the option of following both their friends and the more than 7,000 authors who are also active on the site.
Another Goodreads feature is the user's ability to match his or her books with anyone else's on the site to discern what they've read in common. The software then gives a score based on the percentage of shared titles, thus creating a sense of literary community as its basis. “When I hear of a cool new book, I look to see which of my friends has read it and how they've rated it,” Chandler says. “That's more valuable to me than reading a hundred reviews of a book, because I know these people.”
The soft-spoken Chandler runs Goodreads from his home in Santa Monica; his wife, Elizabeth, is the site's chief librarian and writes the monthly newsletter. In addition, he employs five people who work out of Goodreads' San Francisco office. Goodreads generates revenue through a variety of advertising programs and promotional activities for authors and publishers, including a feature for a book launch. Because Goodreads knows specifically what books and genres people are reading, the package provides custom targeting to consumers. In the near future Chandler hopes to announce an author program called Self-Serve Advertising, targeted to whichever readers the authors want to reach. Already in place is Goodreads' book giveaway program in which an author, for a fee, donates about five copies of a book that Goodreads uses as a promotion. This typically attracts 500 requests, with winners selected at random.
Chandler is confident in Goodreads' future, suggesting that the site could have 10 million members a year from now. Book clubs and discussion groups support his desire to build conversations around books, and those two features alone receive 30,000 comments a day. “We really want to become a platform for reading across all your life. One of our core competencies is making social software that lets people who are passionate about a subject broadcast their word about books. Goodreads isn't just a brand for ourselves, but a multiplatform experience around reading.”
As for Chandler's own status, he's currently reading Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson.
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