OK, you may have already noticed this and I may just be hopelessly behind, but I just realised Kobo no longer shows reviews from Goodreads. Earlier when you went to Kobo and looked at a book which people have reviewed on Goodreads, if all things were set up properly and the ISBN for the Kobo version was added to Goodreads, you’d see Goodreads content right there on the product listing.
For people who have extensively pushed their books on Goodreads to try and get more (good) reviews, this used to be a good thing. For others who found Goodreads to be a cesspool full of snarky reviewers leaving 1 star ratings without explanation, I suppose maybe it wasn’t. This has now changed though.
In March this year, Amazon bought Goodreads. There has been a lot of discussion online about whether or not that’s a good thing, but as far as I can tell, it really doesn’t matter so much. Amazon has claimed they won’t mess with Goodreads or try to ruin it, similar to how they neglect run Shelfari. One thing that has changed now is that obviously Goodreads isn’t looking so great anymore as a source for unbiased reviews for other retailers (Kobo).
While comments from Goodreads suggest that they haven’t actually switched off the API that pushes reviews to other sites, there is only one other plausible explanation: Kobo has taken this feature away themselves. An internal business decision on their part to try and sever ties with what is now part of their biggest competitor. I can’t say I blame them. The one thing I hope they do rectify is, now there are NO reviews on Kobo AT ALL. I can’t even figure out how to write one myself independent of Goodreads. This is in my opinion a problem. If there is no way to gauge the quality of the content on Kobo, readers will look elsewhere. Let’s hope they’re working on a solution to add reviews back again, but in the meantime, Kobo book listings look pretty naked and star-less.
