Personanondata: Amazon.com Buys Shelfari

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Amazon.com Buys Shelfari - Updated

Via Paid Content. Hot on the heels of their acquisition of ABE books, Amazon has purchased the rest of Shelfari. Amazon had invested in the company some two years ago and had hoped it would come to rival librarything in popularity. Interestingly, librarything now also counts Amazon as an investor in it thanks to the investment ABE made in librarything 3-4 years ago. It is likely that librarything owner Tim Spalding will negotiate with Amazon to buy back the share they now own (and I would assume there was a 'change of control' provision in his original deal with ABE). It will be interesting to see who he jumps into bed with next - if anyone.

Personanondata Bookstore

1 comment:

Adam Hodgkin said...: Not sure that I would read it this way. I dont think Tim Spalding will find it easy to buy out Amazon's 40% stake in his company. This is not the kind of situation that appeals to VCs. I would propose an alternative hypothesis: that Amazon decided to buy up Shelfari (for which they could dictate the price now that they have a 40% stake in LT) as a prelude making LT an offer that they cant refuse. I suspect that Amazon want to tidy up this area of social meta-data that they ought to be well-placed to dominate. No anti-trust issues. The sector is still too nichey to be of interest from a regulatory monopolies view point.; 4:30 PM

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Michael Cairns

Michael Cairns is currently Head of Partner and Channel Development for the publishing unit of the American Psychological Association which is a $100million scholarly, academic and educational publisher. In this role, he is responsible for all sales and marketing activities supporting the revenue base and working with current and new partners to expand APA's publishing program and mission. Michael Cairns has served as President, CEO and CRO of several brand name publishing, technology and content-centric businesses. His career includes a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and his operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer. Mr. Cairns has also served on boards including the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.