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.