Los Angeles based Goodreads, a social network focused on book lovers, has managed to get to 650,000 registered users and near profitability without any funding at all in their first year since launch. Today they will announce an angel round of financing from James Currier (founder of Ooga Labs and Tickle), Michael Birch (founder of Bebo), Chris Michel (founder of Military.com and Affinity Labs), Mike Jones (founder of Userplane), True Ventures, and Stan Chudnovsky. The size of the round is not being disclosed, but we’ve heard it is in the $750,000 range.
Goodreads competes with other book-focused social networks we’ve covered, including Library Thing (partially acquired last year by ABEbooks), Amazon-backed Shelfari and others.
Like the competing services, adding books to your virtual collection entails a search and a click – most of the meta data is pulled in via an Amazon web service. Goodreads founder Otis Chandler says the company is focused on the social network aspect of the service, letting users introduce their friends to good books through recommendations, currently reading lists, etc. It certainly seems to be working – the company is right in the mix traffic-wise with Shelfari and Library Thing, and growing quickly.
Ten million books have been added to the site by users, Chandler says. That’s about half of what Library Thing has to date (with a big head start).