John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer just got the exclusive on Amazon.com's acquisition of Seattle's Shelfari. No transaction details were announced but Shelfari is blogging about it. This acquisition is right on the heels of their acquisition of Victoria’s AbeBooks a couple weeks ago.
Techcrunch's Mark Hendrickson pointed out an interesting side story at the time in a post titled Shelfari and LibraryThing: Awkward Bookends to AbeBooks-Amazon Deal.
AbeBooks held a major (although not majority) stake in a site called LibraryThing, where literati can list their favorite books and discuss them. Coincidentally, Amazon has put a reported $1 million into Shelfari, one of LibraryThing’s direct competitors (which also include GoodReads, BookJetty and many others). So it might not be surprising to see Amazon try to join the forces of these two modestly sized startups.
But if the history between LibraryThing and Shelfari is any indication, we’re more likely to see Amazon either place its bets on one and divest its shares in the other, or simply maintain a minority investment in both.
The ‘history’ that Hendrickson is referring to is that LibraryThing’s CEO Tim Spalding publically denounced Shelfari last year for using dirty marketing tactics such as astroturfing blogs and spamming email.
Speculation about Amazon supporting one or the other or even merging the two services didn’t make sense as they serve different types of communities: Shelfari is focused on the casual reader that is interested in talking about what they're reading while LibraryThing is much more focused on serious bibliophiles that love cataloguing their personal libraries. Think “social reading” versus “social cataloguing”.
Today's Shelfari acquisition confirms that consolidation of this space has started with GoodReads being the only large independent player remaining.
At AbeBooks.com our mission is to help people find and buy any book from any bookseller anywhere. AbeBooks, the world’s largest online... [more]
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest... [more]
Based in Seattle, Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and... [more]
Interesting idea that Amazon can actually keep both properties under one roof, could be true if the competition is healthy and only makes companies compete for different users with different techniques. But if there is really a tension between the two of them, it will still be an awkward situation, I believe.
"Independence" is a tricky thing. When the Amazon deal closes with Abebooks, Amazon will not have a majority of the company. They will share in the benefits of LibraryThing's success—and are only too welcome to help us—they will not run the company, and they don't get any LibraryThing data.
Openness and independence are central to what makes LibraryThing tick. So, while Shelfari has put out the standard wording about joining the "family"—I phrase I reserve for my family—we're jabbering about it with our community.
http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=44126
Facebook plugin iRead which is now also available on openSoical which means it now has access to Orkut, Hi5, mySpace users is also growing big. I see more potential in listing my books and what I have read in FB application rather registering with another one. Well that's me though..
Sorry Librarything dudes, but it soudns like you are about to be cut loose :-(
Any ideas on how much Amazon might have paid? You were able to come up with a ballpark for the acquisition of AbeBooks and was wondering if you had any thoughts on the cost of this acquistion.
Thank
Tricky question Michael.
If you assume that Techcrunch's social networking valuation calculation is correct at $132 per unique user - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/23/modeling-the-real-market-value-of-social-networks/ - and that Shelfari has between 100K and 120K uniques per month (Compete.com has them down for 180K visitors/month), the max valuation would be $15 Million.
That being said, vertical social networks don't really monetize well, so I'd peg it closer $10 Million.
The problem with trying to value Shelfari as a traditional social networking property is that it targets a very narrow niche and has an unproven (even less so than others) revenue model. Given this and the current state of the economy, I can't see a value anywhere near $10M or $15M. I would be suprised if the total deal value exceeded a few million and even then a portion of the stock would have belonged to Amazon in the first place.
What may very well have happened is that Shelari went back to the well for another financiang round only to come up dry, in which case Amazon may have picked it up for peanuts.
