Who is making a GoodReads competitor

Amazon bought them, near 0 progress, and now they just killed the public APIs.

From Amazon Chronicles - https://amazonchronicles.substack.com/p/who-can-you-trust-at-amazon

"Amazon Shutters Its Goodreads APIs
To my mind, the most frustrating thing Amazon could do isn’t gobble up my data to sell me stuff I don’t want, exploit its workers and partners, or put its competitors out of business, bad as all three of those things are. It’s that it will destroy whole industries, whole spaces of our digital life, and then take its ball and go home.

That’s Google, you’re thinking. Not so fast; check out what’s happening at Goodreads, an Amazon company that’s cornered the market on online book reviews.

Joe Alcorn, who makes a competitor/complimentary product called Readng (no “I”), comes in hot:

In news that surprises nobody, Goodreads last week quietly announced the deprecation of their public APIs. And I mean really quietly – the only people who were told about this were those unfortunate enough to have their existing API keys disabled without warning. Other than a small banner at the top of the API docs which mentions vague “plans to retire these tools”, nobody else appears to have heard anything from Goodreads, including those whose API keys remain active. So far it seems any key unused for 30 days has been disabled.

Deprecation notice on Goodreads API documentation
So this is an “announcement” much in the way a windshield announces its presence to bugs on a highway, and with the same consequences: dead bugs. Some developers have taken to the API discussion boards and blogs, but the overall impression I’m getting is grim acceptance. Really the surprising thing is how long it took them: Amazon has been in charge at Goodreads for almost 8 years now, and I think we’ve all been expecting this to come at some point.

So why now? What’s changed? Well, the fact is the market’s changing – and Goodreads isn’t. Alternative options are starting to emerge, and since Goodreads has forgotten how to innovate, it wants to use its market position to stifle innovation instead.

This is an understandable reaction! It’s colored by who Joe Alcorn is and what he does, but it’s also shaped by Amazon’s history and the history of every other big company that runs the world.

So who can you trust at Amazon? What can you trust them with? What can you ultimately trust them to do?"