Amazon Buys Book-Centric Social Network

Writers trying to understand the book marketing and various commercial forces within it might do well to read about Amazon's acquisition of Shelfari. It's a social network for book fanciers and, clearly, a potential indirect (or even direct) marketing outlet for Amazon.

As I mentioned before, Amazon also bought AbeBooks, which gave the former a stake in LibraryThing, a Shelfari competitor:

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”.

It might be that Amazon will cut LibraryThing loose, or it could try to fully acquire it as well and merge the two services together.

What is clear for authors, though, is that the market - in a broad sense, running from production to consumer marketing and distribution and sales - is being tied up by Amazon. I think this is a bad situation for any who want to make book writing a part of their businesses. The more concentration in one set of hands, the more control those hands have. If those hands happen to use spamming and other techniques that annoy users, the results could spill over onto the authors.