A pair of interesting addenda to my post on Amazon from earlier in the month:
The online bookselling giant went ahead and snapped up the piece of book cataloging site Shelfari that it didn’t already own.
As we had noted, after buying AbeBooks, Amazon suddenly owned the two big rivals in the book cataloging space, Shelfari and LibraryThing, and since, to this observer, it seemed like combining the two sites would be a non-starter, Amazon was likely to throw its weight behind one or the other. Unsurprisingly, Amazon picked Shelfari, as Tim Spalding, LibraryThing’s founder, has long been wary of Amazon (though not hostile towards it). As TechCrunch speculates, Amazon may divest its shares of LibraryThing, and I’d guess that Spalding wouldn’t mind that too much.
Secondly, bookfinder.com, the extremely comprehensive used book search engine (now owned by Amazon via its purchase of AbeBooks), has released its annual report on the most sought after out-of-print and hard-to-find books over the last year. Once again, Madonna’s relic from the 1990s, Sex, tops the list. But from there the list gets very eclectic and interesting, with books like Bob Dylan’s Drawn Blank, The Jerusalem Bible illustrated by Salvador Dali, and Bruce Davidson’s photo book Subway. The report also has lists by genre and offers up a little background on some of the more interesting titles.