Friday, August 01, 2008

Amazon Acquires ABE

Big news - and I mean big news from the biblio-world this morning as Amazon announces its acquisition of AbeBooks. Tim's got the scoop on what this means for LibraryThing (in which AbeBooks holds a 40% stake). The short version of said scoop, thankfully, is "virtually nothing." There's also an LT Talk post here.

More as it comes.

[I'm going to add updates to this as necessary. Check out this post from former Abe COO Boris Wertz, who's very excited about the deal. Booksellers, however, don't seem to be quite as enthused.

More: Here's the take over at Bookfinder (also an AbeBooks company). And here's a rather strange piece from TechCrunch on the Shelfari/LibraryThing aspects of this deal.

AbeBooks' own take, from Reading Copy, is here. Richard Davies writes, in part, "We’re exceptionally excited about working with Amazon - AbeBooks has been very successful over the years but we know Amazon is the world leader in ecommerce and they can help us in many ways. They are going to help our booksellers sell more books and they are going to help improve the experience of buying books for our customers."

Michael Lieberman has more on the pros and cons now.]