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Amazon buys Shelfari

Looks like Amazon isn’t going to rest until it owns every book-related business on the planet. After acquiring Abebooks just a few weeks ago, the retail giant has now sucked up the social networking site Shelfari, which members use to share opinions of the books they’ve read. According to Information Week, Shelfari is supposed to continue operating as it always had, with “no immediate changes to its service.”

Not to be pessimistic, but haven’t we heard that line before? Executives at the used bookselling site Bibliofind said the same thing when they were acquired by Amazon years ago, and look at them now: they’ve been pretty much completely subsumed. For more history on that, take a look at this lengthy piece about the purchase of Bibliofind on the Book Patrol blog.