Goodreads, which is based in San Francisco and launched in 2007, has 16 million members. The site lets readers keep track of the books they’ve read and want to read; rate and review books; and discover reading recommendations. Following the acquisition, Goodreads will remain headquartered in San Francisco.

Goodreads has served as a fairly “neutral” hub for readers until now — a place where publishers and authors can market and promote their books without being tied to a specific retailer. Until 2012, Goodreads sourced all of its book data from Amazon, but it then decided that the company’s API had become too restrictive and switched its data provider to the book wholesaler Ingram. “Our goal is to be an open place for all readers to discover and buy books from all retailers, both online and offline,” Goodreads told me at the time of the switch. While being an “open place for all readers” may still be Goodreads’ goal, it’s now clearly tied to promoting books for sale on Amazon.

“I wanted to assure you that Goodreads and the team behind it are not going away. We have no plans to change the Goodreads experience and Goodreads will continue to be the wonderful community we all cherish,” Goodreads CEO Chandler wrote on the company’s blog. “Partnering with Amazon will help us focus on making Goodreads an even better place for readers.”

Goodreads is also likely to be less open with access to its data now that it has been acquired by Amazon. In the past, the company has shared information about how its readers discover and buy books and about their digital reading habits, presenting the data at conferences and in blog posts. This past February, for instance, CEO Chandler noted that ebook readers experiment with platforms — a significant percentage of Kindle users, for example, also buy ebooks from Apple’s iBookstore. All of this data is certainly useful for Amazon to have, but the retailer is not likely to see a reason for Goodreads to share the data with others (and with Amazon’s competitors).

Amazon acquired another reading site, Shelfari, in 2008.

This story was updated several times on Thursday afternoon.

Disclosure: Goodreads is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

The deal, with Ingram’s digital distribution arm CoreSource, will make the ebooks available to Amazon competitors like Barnes & Noble, Apple and Kobo — though, of course, those competitors won’t be required to stock Amazon titles. The idea of Apple selling Amazon’s ebooks is particularly interesting, given the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Apple and book publishers for allegedly colluding to set ebook prices.

“We welcome Amazon Publishing’s New York adult group to the growing list of publishers who use our service,” said Phil Ollila, Ingram Content Group’s chief content officer. Titles from Amazon’s West Coast imprints are not included in the Ingram deal.

Amazon New York is publishing its first list this fall. Feature titles include Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Chef, Penny Marshall’s My Mother Was Nuts and Jessica Valenti’s Why Have Kids?

Amazon already makes a couple of its ebooks available through other retailers. Barnes & Noble previously stated that it would not carry Amazon Publishing print titles in its physical stores, in part because it was not allowed to sell the digital editions. Now that Barnes & Noble will have access to the ebooks as well, I’ve asked the company if it is going to change its policy.

A quick search through Barnes & Noble and Kobo’s websites this morning did not yet turn up Amazon NY titles. For example, one of the early titles on Amazon NY’s fall list – Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business by Harley Manning and Kerry Boche — is available through Amazon as a print book and an ebook. Outside In is only available as a print book on Barnes & Noble’s site, and it is not available as an ebook on Kobo. I have asked Ingram for a statement and will update this post when I hear back.

She Writes Press is headed by Brooke Warner, formerly the executive editor of independent publisher Seal Press, and aimed at authors who want to try publishing outside the traditional system, but also want to be part of a “high-quality, curated imprint.” Warner tells me, “We are in our infancy at this stage of the game, but both of us understand publishing and our contacts run deep. We will advocate for our authors just as traditional presses advocate for theirs.”

The company explains how the model works:

Authors pay She Writes Press to edit, print and distribute their work, but are required to undergo a vetting process: manuscripts must be submitted and assessed before publication commences, and if they are deemed not yet ready for publication, recommendations (including editorial feedback) are offered on how to proceed. We are committed to bringing viable projects into the marketplace, and are confident that this process will ensure the quality of our projects and ongoing list.

Authors begin by submitting a book proposal to She Writes Press. The fee for that is $25. The vetting process is done by “professional readers, agents and editors,” Warner told me. “We’re then giving the authors feedback about what track we’re putting them on. Track 1 is good to go, Track 2 is needs a copyedit, and Track 3 is needs a developmental edit. Any Track 2 or 3 author who is open and wanting to take their manuscript to the next level can ultimately qualify to publish on the press. But the work will need to be up to the industry editorial standard.” Factors the vetting team looks at, she says, vary depending on the book’s genre but include “character development, pacing, sequencing, description, ability to draw in the reader, takeaways, structure, narrative voice and story arc.”

When an author’s book is accepted, she signs an agreement and buys the basic “She Publishes” package, which costs $3,900 and includes services like interior design, cover design, ebook production, proofreading, distribution via Ingram and some marketing. Authors can pay extra for services like copyediting and galleys. Each year, She Writes will also choose one to two “passion projects” each year, whose authors get the package for free.

Digital-only publishing is not available. “We are a full-service press that’s committed to e-book offerings, but our primary mission is to publish our authors in print,” the website explains. Authors can choose print-on-demand through Lightning Source, included in the basic package, or can pay extra for a print run.

Once books are published, She Writes Press says it is “committed to helping women establish and build a platform—arguably the most important factor in getting traditionally published—by promoting our authors’ works in a biannual catalog that will be mailed out to reviewers, booksellers, and media; announcing new publications to our existing network; and eventually selling our authors’ books in a She Writes Press online bookstore.”

She Writes Press takes a fee for each sale — 20 percent of each sale on a printed book, and 15 percent of each sale on POD and ebooks. The fee on printed books is for distribution and warehousing, Warner says, and the fee on POD and ebooks is for managing the accounts. “In my experience, the self-publishing biggies, like [Lightning Source], CreateSpace, and Lulu, don’t give authors much hand-holding,” Warner says. “We strive to function like a traditional press in that sense. Authors can contact us with problems and we will make sure their accounts are running smoothly.”

Last year, traditional publisher Penguin added self-publishing services to its community writing site Book Country. Those services range in price from $99 to $549, and like She Writes Press, Penguin takes a cut from each book sold. Penguin faced backlash from some self-published authors who called the initiative overpriced and claimed it took advantage of inexperienced authors who didn’t know how easy it was to self-publish on their own.

She Writes plans to avoid similar criticism by vetting the titles it accepts, though it obviously can’t guarantee their success, and by promoting them once they are published. Self-publishing is easy now, Wicoff admits, but “what’s hard is help you need to make your book the best book it can possibly be, and not feeling alone and without support from experienced people in the process. It’s also pretty much impossible, when you self-publish, to have the credibility that only affiliation with a professionally run press can provide. So we are leveraging the easy part, and providing support for what’s actually hard.”

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