As the Iranian government celebrated the anniversary of their revolution, the social networking and book review site Goodreads recorded a steep drop in traffic from Iran–it seemed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government had censored the site.
After that, an Iranian Goodreads member wrote the company: “your site is recently been filtered by our horrible govrnmt. pls help us! spread it…books make no harm.” Yesterday the Iranian government celebrated the 30th anniversary of the revolution that removed the shah. In December, Goodreads counted 2,600,000 readers in its booming community–together, these readers have written about 64,000,000 books.
Here’s more from the website’s statement: “Books make no harm. In an interview last year, Goodreads Author Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, commented presciently on the Iranian phenomenon on Goodreads: ‘People constantly find ways of connecting. If [Goodreads] is banned in Iran, we need support for those people who just want to connect to the world.'”