Amazon Launches Your Books, Its Goodreads Competitor

Amazon today announced Your Books, a hub for all of your print, Kindle, and Audible books that competes with Goodreads by offering recommendations for future purchases.

“Whether you’ve just started your reading journey with Amazon, or have been a customer since we first opened our digital doors in 1995, your personal library is now at your fingertips,” Amazon’s Melanie DeNardo writes in the announcement post. “The new Your Books feature enables you to conveniently explore all of your Amazon books in one place and offers personalized discovery features to help connect you to your next great read. This new feature shows you every single book you’ve purchased, borrowed, or saved across print books, Kindle, and Audible.”

Your Books is currently in beta and it can be found on the Amazon website. As promised, it helps you find all of your Amazon books—Kindle, Audible, and print titles—in a single location, and it can filter the view by genre, author, or series if desired. But it also offers an optional Discovery mode—disabled by default—that enables recommendations, and a Saved books interface so you can access the books you’ve saved to your Amazon Wishlists.

The Discovery mode recommendations are interesting: There’s a single list on the main page, but if you navigate to Discovery mode, you can view them book-by-book so you can find books similar to one you read and liked. And you can dive into various tags—“by Stephen King,” “Suspense,” “Supernatural,” and so on—to fine-tune the recommendations.

The Saved books view also offers filtering, you can view all titles or just those in a list, a genre, or by a particular author. It’s also a good reminder that I need to remove a few of those saved items.

Interesting.