Amazon has acquired twelve year old Canadian company Abebooks (formerly the Advanced Book Exchange), the companies just announced. AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books focusing on used, rare and out of print titles for sale by independent booksellers - it currently has 110 million books for sale from 13,500 sellers.
The company has been around since 1996 and fills a niche for Amazon in hard-to-find or out-of-print books. Rather than hold its own inventory, it acts as a digital marketplace for established booksellers.
AbeBooks also owns 40 percent of LibraryThing (a social app for keeping track of your books and finding other like-minded book lovers). Whereas Amazon is an investor in Shelfari. Now Amazon will own a piece of both of those competing startups.
AbeBooks CEO Dr. Hannes Blum sent an email out to its booksellers today talking about the acquisition, saying the company would continue to operate as a stand-alone business. The email is below; the press release is here.
Dear Booksellers,
AbeBooks has reached an agreement to be acquired by Amazon.com, Inc. This is a major landmark in the 12-year history of AbeBooks.
AbeBooks will continue to operate as a stand-alone business with all aspects of AbeBooks’ bookseller and customer experience remaining intact. AbeBooks’ headquarters will remain in Victoria, BC, Canada, and our European offices will remain in Dusseldorf, Germany. We will continue to support both our international marketplaces and our domestic marketplace here in Canada. I will continue to lead AbeBooks.
We expect this change to allow AbeBooks to expand its offerings and introduce new features and services to enhance the book buying and selling experience. Amazon is committed to further developing the AbeBooks brand and building upon the success of the past 12 years. This is not the first time AbeBooks has changed hands since being launched in 1996. Hubert Burda Media, a German media company, took a majority shareholding in 2003.
The bookselling community has been a vital component in our success, and we are grateful for your continuing support. We will be happy to answer questions about our new ownership and what the future holds. A bookseller Roundtable will be held on Thursday August 7th at 2:30pm PDT/9:30pm GMT/7:30am AU where I and the Director of Sales & Account Management, Shaun Jamieson, will answer any questions you might have. In addition, the ‘Ask AbeBooks a question’ folder will continue to be available for ongoing questions from the seller community.
We realize this is important news for our community, and we are confident that this acquisition will greatly benefit AbeBooks’ sellers and provide us with many opportunities for future growth.
For more details please see the official release posted today.
Regards,
Dr. Hannes Blum
President and CEO
AbeBooks
Abebooks is quite a large company, now Amazon will grow even more.
Hmm I missed the point that it is going to be still a stand alone company, wasn’t show up the whole post for some reason.
Not too surprised — Amazon will find big opportunity with AbeBooks, I believe.
This is very big news in the bookselling world. Abebooks is one of two (or three) large used books companies.
http://usedbooksblog.com/blog/.....-abebooks/
It’s a good move, in my opinion, for Amazon to solidify its core business. The question will be whether Barnes & Noble responds by buying Borders and/or Alibris.
I think Barnes and Noble is toast in the online world.
Any idea of the financial terms?
HAHAHAHA
Funny Google Search Results….Really Funny
http://vishtecho.blogspot.com/.....ts_15.html
Financial terms have not been released but my calculations put the deal somewhere between $90-120 Million.
http://www.techvibes.com/blog/.....-abebooks/
Interesting calculations but unsure that ABE has similar operating margins or would be assigned the same multiple as eBay.
People still read paper-based books? GO BUY A KINDLE!
So, buy a $300 device with constrained DRM, then buy digital books that are more expensive than most used books?
If you need to read the latest best seller right away, you’ll get the digital version cheaper, but wait and the secondary market beats down the price.
Kindle for mass-market, I’m not sold. Kindle for Textbooks, a winning proposition.
What if TechCrunch would release a magazine. Won’t you read it? I bet you would. And go figure..it’s paper based
The Amazon Kindle … The answer for question you weren’t asking
http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/080414.html
oh Canada
After 50%+ taxes that’ll leave you just enough for a Latte minus the whip cream.
A common misconception perpetuated by the media quoting people griping about taxes in canada. In reality, total Canadian tax burden is lower than the US and many other G8 countries, plus we get stuff from our gov’t (though sadly not from our politicians).
This will uplift Amazon to a new level.
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
Amazon is the Walmart SuperCenter of the web. I have to ask, what is their longterm strategy? We’ve seen Amazon Fresh (fresh.amazon.com) which is their grocery delivery branch and just within the last few days they’ve launched their money services arm. Do they have a core strategy or is Jeff Bezos just trying to take over the world wide web?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for latter but it’s food for thought nonetheless
Looks like Goodreads is the only major social network for readers that isn’t partially owned by amazon now. Scary!
Always loved ABEbooks when buying gifts for book lovers - a great way to get a collectible first or signed edition.
It will be interesting to see what Amazon does with them.
Whatever happens, I hope they don’t make it like their Amazon Marketplace where they ship only to handful of countries. I just ordered few books from AbeBooks as Amazon didn’t ship them to my country in their marketplace.
Abe also owns BookFinder, one of the largest and probably the oldest book price comparison sites. Maybe they’ll just shut down and forward all their visitors to http://www.bookcost.com — Yes please.
I’ve actually ordered from AbeBooks.com in the past, and they’re the first place I look when I’m searching for a hard to find book. I think they’ll be a great addition to Amazon - I just hope they get the attention they need from their new owner.
I couldn’t care less for Amazon (or Abebooks) - they have plenty of cash and can manage themselves. What I do wonder is market segmentation and how it will be reflected on books prices. So far I was able to find cheaper books with abebooks, and their mail notification was perhaps the only kind of spam I had open with guilty pleasure. Mmmmm, Amazon is in getting rid of rivals? What is good for customers then? I am not Amazon investor, I am customer.
*saves above letter from CEO and does a ‘find all: abebooks’ replace with: pazap.com’, and prints it * This “The Secret” book better damn work…. : P -Dom, founder: Pazap.com and ScrewBookPrices.com
Thsi deal is further proof about how well Amazon expands with little negative fall out.