Iran Book Update: No More Good Reads in Tehran

Goodreads does not look like a dangerous website. Its welcome message is an innocent, "Have you ever wanted a better way to:

Get great book recommendations from people you know?
Keep track of what you've read and what you'd like to read?
Form a book club, answer book trivia, collect your favorite quotes?

Apparently, however, that is now enough to constitute a political threat. Last week, a Goodreads blogger wrote:

Last Friday, February 5, 2010, we were saddened to see Goodreads traffic in Iran plummet (screenshot above), which can only mean that Goodreads has joined the ranks of sites blocked by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime. One Iranian Goodreads member wrote to us and confirmed the news: "your site is recently been filtered by our horrible govrnmt. pls help us! spread it...books make no harm."

Inadvertently, there may have been a clue to Goodreads' fate in the next paragraph:

We couldn't agree more. 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."

Nafisi's work is despised by some prominent academics in Tehran, in part because of the content of Lolita, in part because of her connections with "right-wing" US think tanks.

Still, it is not Nafisi but Becca Fitzpatrick with Hush, Hush ("For Nora Grey, romance was not part of the plan. She's never been particularly attracted to the boys at her school, no matter how much her best friend, Vee, pushes them at her.") who is Goodreads' most popular author at the moment. So I'm still thinking that the site isn't necessarily the advance force for an American "regime change".

Perhaps the authorities in Tehran could enlighten us?