"... 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.
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?
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?
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."
Abebooks is also a more usable site than Amazon, in my experience. Because being a marketplace for second-hand books is their only business, they're able to focus on it far better than Amazon. Not having any adverts for lawnmowers makes it far easier and more pleasant to use.
My sister is an online used bookseller, and she has both an ABEbooks and an Amazon Z-shop account. She says she prefers to list with ABE because they charge a lower commission. I wonder if that will change now.
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?
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.
