Hopefully they will invest in development of the actual site. Its ui is inconsistent, sometimes confusing, and at times very slow. While they support many many use cases, the workflow for a simple thing like "add a book I am reading and the start date" is needlessly convulted. I also don't like how they prioritize the English version in the results even if you search for another / the original language. Especially in the latter case, the original should be highlighted. And you can only mark the edition your read, not the language explicitly.
All that's true, but it's actually one of the reasons I love the site. It's got a funky, homemade feel that I find quite charming. Part of the reason that I'm comfortable contributing my reading information to the site (~500 books so far) is that I don't feel like it's being sucked into a corporate borg. This past year I've been trying to get away from Amazon by replacing the Kindle app on my phone with Moonreader, so I'm really sad to see Goodreads get assimilated.
If funky and homemade is your thing, there's always librarything (which also has a real business model, so not likely to get swallowed up any time soon.)
Apparently, Amazon holds a 40% stake in Abebooks which owns LibraryThing. From Pandodaily, "Amazon already owns Shelfari as well as Abebooks, which bought a 40-percent stake in LibraryThing in 2006, so it owns all or part of three of the top social-reading sites."
They actually don't prioritise the English version — they simply prioritise the version that the highest number of users have read/rated/reviewed. Sometimes this causes unexpected issues the other way round, such as with old English children's books by authors like Enid Blyton that these days are much more popular in Indonesia.
