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.

How Many Kindles Have Sold? Almost a Quarter Million

Through an inside source, the blog TechCrunch has a lead on the number of Kindle e-book readers that Amazon has sold: 240,000, which turns out to be a lot of money -- probably over $100 million though some estimations that I found reasonably done. Over the next year, estimates of how many more Kindle units that Amazon will sell seem to be running between about a half million and upwards of 750,000. It's hardly the whole book buying public, but this shows a readiness of many consumers for electronic book reading. That will affect publisher and, therefore, author business strategies.

Amazon Buys AbeBooks

Canadian online book reseller AbeBooks announced today that Amazon is acquiring the company

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.

First, I find it very hard to believe that the "we want to keep you as you are" was either sincerely delivered or ever said. Large companies don't generally do acquisitions in closely aligned businesses to keep them running as standalone entities, and the AbeBooks referral model to third party resellers is exactly what Amazon does. Put the two together, and you have fewer markets for books, and more control in one set of hands.

As Amazon has shown with its push to force publishers using POD to get their service from the online giant, it wants to dominate the book industry, both as a reseller and as an industry vendor. They've been trying to lock up business on the Kindle, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if the company soon bought a book publishing outlet. They could print their own copies, they already have distribution and warehousing, and, with a smart acquisition, probably could do at least as well as Barnes & Noble.

Now you can expect Amazon to push on the used book presence it has let tiny third parties pioneer and develop on its site. I suspect it will be another major blow to the industry independent resellers, many of whom have found that the only way to make a living was to shift to online selling.

I have had nothing against Amazon on principle, even with creating a market for used books. But the company is trying to control too much, and that is clearly bad for the industry as a whole. It may be that they think they are "saving" the industry, though I'd bet that most of the managers' time there is simply spent on how to keep growing their own company.