Earlier today we reported that Amazon had acquired AbeBooks, an online retailer of rare and used books from independent publishers.

AbeBooks held a major (although not majority) stake in a site called LibraryThing, where the literati can list their favorite books and discuss them. Coincidentally, Amazon has put a reported $1 million into Shelfari, one of LibraryThing’s direct competitors (which also include GoodReads, BookJetty and many others). So it might not be surprising to see Amazon try to join the forces of these two modestly sized startups.

But if the history between LibraryThing and Shelfari is any indication, we’re more likely to see Amazon either place its bets on one and divest its shares in the other, or simply maintain a minority investment in both.

Tim Spalding, the founder of LibraryThing, has publicly denounced Shelfari for using dirty marketing tactics such as astroturfing blogs and spamming inboxes. And he hasn’t minced words or backed down from his charge that Shelfari is a “bad actor”, having repeated Gawker’s description of Shelfari as “basically social networking rapists” and criticized Shelfari’s attempts to fix its invitation system.

While Shelfari has publicly addressed the charges of astroturfing (calling it the “unintended work of an unexperienced but well-meaning intern”) and spamming (the unintended result of “explosive growth” and a poorly designed user interface), it hasn’t used its own corporate blog to lash back at LibraryThing. And since most of this drama occurred nearly a year ago, it’s possible that any bad blood as been surmounted. But factor in the fact that these two startups are based on opposite ends of the country (Shelfari in Seattle, Washington and LibraryThing in Portland, Maine), and it appears unlikely that Amazon’s acquisition of AbeBooks will result in any consolidation of the book-centric social networking space.

In any case, Spalding has publicly asserted that LibraryThing will continue to operate as an independent entity, sending only anonymized user data back to AbeBooks. When reached for comment, he did say that he was open to selling the same type of data to Amazon, but he insisted that he would never sell “core user data” to Amazon and that he really doubts anyone “will propose marriage” between his company and Shelfari.

Josh Hug, co-founder and CEO of Shelfari’s parent company Tastemakers, said he had no specific comments about the AbeBooks-Amazon deal, but he did say that “Amazon has been a very supportive investor and we look forward to continuing to work closely with them.”

Los Angeles based Goodreads, a social network focused on book lovers, has managed to get to 650,000 registered users and near profitability without any funding at all in their first year since launch. Today they will announce an angel round of financing from James Currier (founder of Ooga Labs and Tickle), Michael Birch (founder of Bebo), Chris Michel (founder of Military.com and Affinity Labs), Mike Jones (founder of Userplane), True Ventures, and Stan Chudnovsky. The size of the round is not being disclosed, but we’ve heard it is in the $750,000 range.

Goodreads competes with other book-focused social networks we’ve covered, including Library Thing (partially acquired last year by ABEbooks), Amazon-backed Shelfari and others.

Like the competing services, adding books to your virtual collection entails a search and a click – most of the meta data is pulled in via an Amazon web service. Goodreads founder Otis Chandler says the company is focused on the social network aspect of the service, letting users introduce their friends to good books through recommendations, currently reading lists, etc. It certainly seems to be working – the company is right in the mix traffic-wise with Shelfari and Library Thing, and growing quickly.

Ten million books have been added to the site by users, Chandler says. That’s about half of what Library Thing has to date (with a big head start).

We’re hearing that Amazon has invested $1 million or so in Seattle based Shelfari, beating out at least one venture firm that competed for the deal.

Shelfari is a website where users input all of the books they own, and have an online visual representation of their library to share with others. Users can share their library through the Shelfari website or via a widget, and make money by linking to the books for sale at Amazon. They launched well after competitor LibraryThing, which was itself partially acquired last year by ABEbooks.

The company won’t comment on the financing, so this isn’t officially confirmed. We expect an announcement shortly, however.

Writing about Etsy yesterday got me fired up on tagging again, so I am going to write about at least two tagging sites tonight that I’ve been testing. The first is Library Thing, which is turning into quite a nice service for tagging your real-world books.

Registration is simple – give it a username and a password. No other personal information is requested. Adding books is just as easy. So many people are using Library Thing (they recently accounced they had 1 million tags) now that a simple search on an author or title will most likely pull the book up, which can be added to your catalog with a single click. You can also input ISBNs if you like. Quickly add tags, a rating and a review if you like. It’s fast and easy to add books and metadata.

Library Thing is free for up to 200 books, with a premium service for more books. I love the last sentence in their FAQ for pricing:

At present, a free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. A paid account allows you to catalog any number of books. Paid accounts cost $10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime. I conservatively predict the revenue will enable me to recline all day on an enormous pile of gold.

Library Thing also just released a new feature called “tag info pages” which has lots of information on a given tag. Here’s Fiction, for example.

Listal is another company that does this, although Listal also allows information on dvds, games and music. If you are really into books, go with Library Thing. If you have a big collection of all media, go with Listal. And if you have a mac, use Delicious Library, which lets you scan books in with a digital camera, saving countless hours.

I have a lot of books. And I move a lot, often to other countries. Moving books sucks and so I’ve moved most of them to my parents house in Washington. Since my parents have are retired and have a lot of time on their hands, I’m hoping to get them to do all of the hard work in uploading the initial book data. Dad, how ’bout it?