"Earlier this year Abebooks.com made a significant investment in LibraryThing.com, a social networking site for book lovers. Since then the e-retailer has been creating links between the two sites to bring more bibliophiles together and get more of them to search for and purchase used and rare tomes. So if the shopper looking for the Buddhism book gets profoundly stuck because of his lack of information, he can send out an all-points bulletin to LibraryThing social networkers, many of whom may be able to help in the hunt.
'We're really in the search business; we're about finding a unique book,' says Boris Wertz, COO at Abebooks Inc. 'And making it easier to find books on our site beyond using the search tool is a major goal of ours.'
LibraryThing is a fantastic tool for avid book readers and collectors and may be even more sophisticated than the community features of 'the Big Kahuna' of online bookselling, Amazon.com, says Sucharita Mulpuru, senior retail analyst at Forrester Research Inc. 'The tags seem more relevant,' she adds, 'and the lists seem more germane to book lovers than the random lists that often show up on other user-generated content sites.'"
Congratulations to both AbeBooks and LibraryThing for this - it's definitely well-deserved!
Also in AbeBooks news today, Forbes columnist Alice LaPlante comments on the site's excellent e-mail reminder system.
