Amazon agreed today to acquire Goodreads, a book-recommendation site which helps readers find and share books, for an undisclosed figure, according to a press release. The acquisition is expected to close in the second fiscal quarter of 2013.

Amazon hope Goodreads, which is based in San Francisco, can help provide it with an additional avenue with which to reach readers that will allow the immense company to create more book buys both from its physical warehouses as well as its digital library.

"Amazon and Goodreads share a passion for reinventing reading," Russ Grandinetti, Amazon Vice President of Kindle Content said in the release. "Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world."

Otis Chandler, Goodreads CEO and co-founder said the acquisition will allow his operation to rapidly spread the Goodreads technology to millions of readers around the world.

Chandler added that he hopes the venture with Amazon and Kindle allows the partnership to inspire greater literary discussion as well as help more readers find books - in print or digitally - that they may not have discovered otherwise.

Founded in 2007, Goodreads currently boasts more than 16 million members as well as upwards of 30,000 book clubs which are now on the Goodreads site.

Over just the past three months, Goodreads members have added more than four books per second to the "want to read" shelves of the book-recommendation site, according to the release.

Following the acquisition, Goodreads's headquarters will remain in San Francisco, CA.

Following two years of developmental phases, Bookish, a book discovery website co-owned by three of the world's most powerful publishers, was opened for business last month. Today, less than two months following Bookish's opening, Amazon announced it had purchased Goodreads, considered as the lead book-related social network available.

The sites, Bookish and Goodreads, while very similar to one another, are structured differently in terms of how recommendations are generated. Bookish, which is financially backed by publishers Hachette, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, bases its recommendations on content analysis more than Goodreads, which focuses more on a user's past activity and behavior of similar users.

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Amazon, Kindle