Amazon Buys Another Books-Focused Social Site Shelfari
Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is buying up another books-focused social network Shelfari, three weeks after it acquired AbeBooks, which holds a 40 percent stake in Shelfari’s main rival, LibraryThing. The Seattle-based startup was founded last year by Josh Hug, the former director of device engineering at RealNetworks (NSDQ: RNWK), and in fact Amazon was a seed investor in the company…it had raised a total of $1 million.
Interestingly, there is no love lost between the two rivals Shelfari and LibraryThing, as SeattlePI describes: LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding has called Shelfari a “bad actor” for engaging in what he called a massive campaign of “astroturfing,” the practice of planting positive comments about a service on blogs. It is likely that AMZN disposes of its stake in LibraryThing, or could conceivably be merged together.
Related StoriesPosted In: Media & Publishing, Books, Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Mergers & Acquisitions, Social Media, Companies, Amazon.com, abebooks, librarything, shelfari
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Comments (2)
Aug 26, 2008 2:09 AM
What was the purchase price? Any insight into how much money they were making? Stats on pageviews, estimates of revenue, number of employees?
That kind of information is trivial to gather, why not add it to every post? It would really make this blog a lot more useful.
Aug 26, 2008 9:13 AM
I don’t think that it is an either or between Shelfari and LibraryThing as they offer very different products as Techvibes notes: http://techvibes.com/blog/amazon.com-buys-shelfari