HE SMELLS BLOOD. (Photo: flickr.com/oreilly)

As if anyone in the publishing industry needed another reason to view Amazon with suspicion and alarm: Today the goliath announced it's acquiring literary-themed social networking site Goodreads. Head for your bunkers; we've just gone to End of Publishing DefCon 1.

Said Amazon's VP of Kindle Content, Russ Grandinetti, “Amazon and Goodreads share a passion for reinventing reading." He continued to wax poetic:

“Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world. In addition, both Amazon and Goodreads have helped thousands of authors reach a wider audience and make a better living at their craft. Together we intend to build many new ways to delight readers and authors alike.”

That's all fine and dandy, but the real motive probably has more to do with cold, hard cash. The acquisition will allow Amazon to further tighten its choke-hold over the bookselling market, as Goodreads has a 15-million-member community of people who love nothing more than recommending new titles to each other. If you don't know the meaning of the word "synergy," you can look it up in your Kindle dictionary.

This is going to put an impossible amount of pressure on those poor bastards at Bookish.

(Photo: AngelList)

AngelList, the Facebook for startups, just did NYC job seekers in the tech sector a major solid. Today the company released a graphical breakdown of the average salaries of tech companies, drawn from data collected through its jobs portal, which helps match startups with prospective talent. The information is quite revealing, and much more detailed than what you'd find on a site like GlassDoor.

First thing's first: the average salary of a startup employee in Silicon Valley is $101,000, whereas those in New York average only (lol) $90,000. We probably shouldn't complain, though: there are a host of cities with lower average salaries than us, like Denver and Houston (though those cities have a much lower cost of living).

According to PandoDaily, the average salary for a dev across all the job postings is naturally higher than for other positions, at $93,000; for marketers it's slightly less at $92,000 and designers are earning $88,000 on average.

As for the NYC companies with the highest average salary: Stylecaster boasts an average salary of $176,000, so if you have any friends who work there, they better not even think about asking you to split the brunch bill. Rewind.me, Bonobos and Bookish dole out an average salary of $126k, while Venmo's average is $123k. Most jobs fall into the $80-90k range, with an average salary of $87,000: Fitocracy, Seatgeek and Skillshare all fall into this category.

It's worth noting that these averages are only based on job listings posted to AngelList, so if a company is only advertising developer positions on the platform, its average salary will probably appear higher than it actually is. Still, the tool is helpful both for the job seeking and the cripplingly nosy: you can also break down average salaries by role, like developer, or skills, like specific programming languages you know.

Now go, Betabeat readers. Tell your boss you deserve to be paid more! But once you get that raise, we hope you'll remember the little people.