
Amazon To Acquire Abebooks - drm237
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/amazon-to-acquire-abebooks/
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zandorg
They bought Bibliofind and destroyed it. I hope they don't destroy Abebooks
too.

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bootload
_"... AbeBooks also owns 40 percent of LibraryThing (a social app for keeping
track of your books and finding other like-minded book lovers). Whereas Amazon
is an investor in Shelfari. Now Amazon will own a piece of both of those
competing startups. ..."_

This is a problem. Shelfari is second rate (spam merchants) while LibraryThing
is very good. This is one of the disadvantages of investment from leaders in
industries.

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fallentimes
It seems to fit well in to Amazon's long tail approach. But I'm really curious
about the price.

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matt1
According to the article, Abebooks acts as a digital marketplace and does not
hold its own inventory. If that is the case, why doesn't Amazon just go after
booksellers themselves? Amazon offers the same service with a much wider
audience, no?

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gruseom
ABE was in the used book market for many years before Amazon and has a large
entrenched base of booksellers who would be difficult to wrench away. All the
more so since (speaking for myself, at least) they earned a high level of
customer loyalty over the years.

In fact, they're a great example of the companies pg has been talking about
recently - the ones that make the world a better place just by quietly
providing a great service. They basically made the hard to find, out-of-print
book a thing of the past.

Edit: by the way, does anybody know the story of how they went about amassing
such a large network of used bookstores?

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jbenz
This article is a couple of years old. It's an interview with AbeBooks co-
founder Rick Pura. They found a need and solved it.

"We went to the booksellers conventions, and we passed out our brochures and
sent them off to whatever lists of booksellers we could find. And, word of
mouth spread on the Internet fairly quickly."

[http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/233-AbeBooks-
com-...](http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/233-AbeBooks-com-Co-
founder-Rick-Pura)

~~~
gruseom
Thank you, that's very informative.

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weegee
this is good, I've ordered countless books through abebooks and just recently
my citi card has begun charging an international transaction fee based upon
abebooks being a Canadian company. perhaps now being owned by Amazon this
won't happen anymore?

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maw
It won't depend on ownership. If the Abebooks subsidiary remains in Canada
(which they say they will), using Canadian banks (which they didn't say, but
it seems likely to me), you can probably expect the international transaction
fees to remain as well.

