In the wake of the Corrain incident, Goodreads released a statement saying that while it welcomed both positive and negative reviews, it “prohibits reviews that are not relevant to the book, harass readers or authors, or attempt to artificially deflate or inflate the overall rating of the book”.
A Goodreads spokesperson said on Saturday that in 2024 it “welcomed millions of readers and we saw strong year-over-year growth in book tracking with our community adding hundreds of millions of books to their want to read, currently reading, and read shelves”.
In a blogpost entitled “Leaving Goodreads in 2025!” just before Christmas, a blogger and reviewer going by the name Books With Bunny wrote: “I don’t love that Goodreads is owned by Amazon.
In 2023, debut author-to-be Cait Corrain was dropped by her publisher, Del Rey, and her planned publication was scrapped after she admitted creating fake Goodreads accounts to boost the ratings on her own work and attack other debut authors with books due out at the same time as hers.
For 18 years, bibliophiles have been able to catalogue their reading, leave reviews and star ratings, and get recommendations for their next read on Goodreads, which was set up by two Stanford University alumni from California.
