Here's some book news that will prove to be divisive. TechCrunch's Drew Olanoff writes:

Today, Amazon has announced the acquisition of social reading service, Goodreads. Specific terms of the deal weren’t disclosed and it should close by the end of Q2.

Goodreads had raised $2.75M in funding from the likes of True Ventures, since launching in January 2007. When we talked to them last August, the site had over 10M members and had catalogued more than 360M books, adding 22M each month. Now, the site boasts over 16M users.

Frankly, I'm not surprised; the amount of information that GoodReads has collected over the years has to be massive, and Amazon can put that information to use in all sorts of ways. Here's the GoodReads announcement of the sale, in which GoodReads promises that "Amazon supports us continuing to grow our vision as an independent entity, under the Goodreads brand and with our unique culture." Amazon bought another book-related social media site, Shelfari, back in 2008. They haven't done very much with it in the time since.

This isn't going to sit well with quite a few people. I know a lot of librarians and independent booksellers who have been avid GoodReads users, keeping a log of every book they've read on the site, alongside to-read lists and more. Most of them will probably stop using GoodReads immediately, now that it's owned by Amazon.