Potential Apple/Goodreads Partnership Quashed by Amazon Acquisition
Before Amazon's acquisition of Goodreads earlier this year, Apple had been talking to the company about a partnership between Goodreads and Apple's iBookstore.
However, once Amazon got into acquisition talks with Goodreads, those talks with Apple broke off, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.
Goodreads had proposed its reviews and ratings appear within iTunes when users searched for a title, one of the people said. iTunes has already integrated Rotten Tomatoes movie ratings in such a way. Apple was entertaining the idea, but talks didn’t progress much, two of the people said.
Around March, Apple pinged Goodreads to move forward with the talks, these people said. ITunes officials were perplexed when Goodreads executives went quiet, two of the people said.
Goodreads is a popular book-recommendation site that would seem to fit well into Amazon's sales recommendation system. Amazon has indicated that it will keep the company as a separate entity, but will integrate its recommendations into its system going forward.
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