http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com by John Paczkowski Sun, 22 Nov 2009 06:03:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 http://allthingsd.com/theme/images/logo-rss.jpg http://allthingsd.com/ 144 22 http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080826/short-shelfari-life/ http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080826/short-shelfari-life/#comments Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:22:58 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=3896 Amazon (AMZN) racked up its second acquisition of the month today, announcing the purchase of Shelfari, a social-networking site for bibliophiles. This just three weeks after the retailer acquired AbeBooks, an online marketplace for rare books that happens to hold an equity stake in Shelfari’s chief rival, LibraryThing. Which makes for an awkward situation, given the bad blood between the two. LibraryThing has been a vocal critic of Shelfari, denouncing it as a “bad actor” that’s built its business through astroturfing and spam. But now that bad actor is owned by one of LibraryThing’s own investors. “LibraryThing is clearly worried about today’s acquisition,” Richard MacManus writes over at ReadWriteWeb. “… Founder and lead developer of LibraryThing Tim Spalding notes that “Amazon can make Shelfari the choice of casual book lovers who see a button on Amazon.com and click on it.” LibraryThing hopes to compete with this by being a superior service. However it’s very difficult to compete against Amazon’s bulk.”

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