Shelfari, a social network for bibliophiles, has been acquired by Amazon for an undisclosed amount. Amazon has been a longtime supporter of the Seattle based startup, having invested $1 million in the site in February 2007.
The move comes less than a month after Amazon’s acquisition of AbeBooks, a vendor of rare and used books from independent publishers. As part of that acquisition Amazon also got a stake in Shelfari’s competitor LibraryThing, which AbeBooks had previously purchased a 40% stake in.
This resulted in an awkward scenario – while Shelfari and LibraryThing are similar and could conceivably be merged by Amazon pending a dual aquision, there is bad blood between them. LibraryThing’s founder has openly criticized Shelfari for spamming users and astroturfing blogs, and generally behaving as a “bad actor”.
In light of the tension between the companies (and their locations on opposite sides of the country), we speculated that Amazon was going to have to choose to acquire one of the competitors and divest its shares in the other. Amazon has clearly sided with Shelfari, though a later acquisition of LibraryThing is still feasible.
You can see Shelfari’s blog post on the acquisition here.
Congrats to Josh and the entire team!
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I really don’t think that it is one OR the other – the companies offer different products as Techvibes points out: http://techvibe...m-buys-shelfari
I think it shows a viable business strategy for quite a number of startups: build an Amazon affiliate that could require Amazon to pay huge affiliate earnings and they will choose to acquire you.
Have you ever tried carrying Amazon affiliate ads? They bring in so much less than Adsense. So you’re theory is completely wrong.
Amazon bought them because they want to expand their reach, not to skip paying $300 a month in affiliate fees.
Agree with Dave, it takes a huge traffic volume to do well from Amazon affiliates – and that only if you have the right audience too.
The Amazon affiliate eCPMs are way inferior to those that could come normally through AdSense and, in my experience, the only instances where the situation can be reversed is for search-oriented sites.
http://www.libr...php?topic=44126
How about GoodReads at http://www.goodreads.com – it’s a pretty good book-centric social network.
Goodreads, is the best.
Site navigation could use some improvement but otherwise Goodreads feels like it was created by people who love books as much as I do.
I am not that excited about this fact
And lets seee how they manage the two in a few days
I’ve never heard of Shelfari, but I will check it out now. As for Amazon ads or Google… I never understood how either work, but that is for a different topic I suppose.
Good way to sell books, I would think. If someone has read all of Wilbur Smith’s books, for ex., then put an ad for the latest one out next on the reader’s Safari page.
I joined Safari, and while one might think it has potential in social networking and chatting with persons of like literary taste, seems you just get spammed by Writers of the Purple Prose and what might be called “lonely folks.”
Well, Shelfari could use some help since they have the lowest traffic volume of the top three (Shelfari, LibraryThing and Goodreads) and, IMO, have the worst UI of the three as well.
http://usedbook...-buys-shelfari/
What’s more interesting to me is that Amazon seems to be refocusing its efforts on its bread-and-butter book vertical – Abebooks, Shelfari and Kindle.
I’ve been using the Virtual Bookshelf application on Facebook for this purpose…I love it.
I really dislike Shelfari’s UI, its slowness, and its lack of user input. To me, it’s all flash and no substance. LibraryThing may not have the flash factor, but for anyone even kinda serious about books, it’s far superior.
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I think it’s strange how Shelfari, Goodreads, and Librarything are always mentioned in the same breath without mentioning stronger programs like weRead. The first three might get more traffic to their individual websites, but weRead is far ahead of them as far as integration within social networks goes.
To illustrate, weRead has 649,168 active users on facebook alone. In comparison shelfari has 9,507 facebook users, goodreads has 35,741, and librarything has 809. That’s a huge difference.
There’s a lot of competition in this space and in my opinion, the programs that are going to succeed will have to do so on existing social networks rather then try to exist as standalone websites. Just think- which is easier: getting your friends to create a new account at an unfamiliar website or getting them to add a facebook app? It’s far easier to add the app that works on top of a preexisting social network then to start building a new network from scratch, and this is why the growth of these programs will be largely based on their ability to work within social networks, and as far as that goes, weRead has a huge lead.
Your thoughts?
Interestingly, Amazon already had this capability, even before the Shelfari and AbeBooks acquisition. It’s called My Media Library.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of these sites out there. When I first started building a web-based barcode scanner component in Flash, it was with the intention of building one of these things; but there are simply too many people doing it already. They’re all dependant on Amazon for their revenue, so the writing is on the wall: Amazon sees the business opportunity for such an application (i.e. revenue driver, personalization driver, data acquisition), has bought the two main players, and will likely kill them and migrate the user base to its own internal offering.
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Allow me to point out that a big chunk of Shelfari’s application is built on the services layer of MindTouch Deki. Edit Author pages, etc and you’ll see evidence in the form of our DekiScript expression language.
oh, I should include: http://www.mindtouch.com
me to
very good for me.