Amazon Acquires Shelfari

Amazon, long a supporter of Shelfari, has decided to acquire the book-oriented social network. While the idea of Amazon acquiring a social network centered on books may seem like common sense, it could have some interesting repercussions in the publishing world.

In recent years, Amazon has been making a push towards gaining a big stake in the self-publishing and the electronic books industry. The Amazon Kindle is Amazon's answer to the old-fashioned book store, and CreateSpace, which is an Amazon company, allows would-be authors an avenue for publishing their works.

But self-publishing and independent publishing have struggled to compete with traditional publishing for two basic reasons: quality and marketing.

Obviously, the quality of the average self-published or independently published book will not compare favorably with the quality of a book published by one of the top publishers any more than the average person playing a game of pick up basketball at their local gym would be able to compete with an NBA player. But the cream of the crop -- books such as Eragon -- could very well compete with traditionally published books.

However, marketing is an area in which even the highest quality self-published books would have difficulty competing. Not only do the top publishers spend thousands of dollars on marketing, they have well-defined distribution that enables them to accomplish the one thing that is of utmost importance in publishing: getting the book in stores.

This brings us to the idea of a book-oriented social network tied in with self-publishing or independent publishing. A high quality self-published book is easily overlooked in the sea of self-published and independently published manuscripts. What is needed is a way to sift through the sea of not-so-great books to find the true gems -- which is where social networking could help.

It will be interesting to see if Amazon uses Shelfari as a way to market their CreateSpace and Kindle offerings, or if they simply use it to sell more traditional books. If they do use it to promote independent and self-published authors, it could send an interesting ripple through the publishing industry.

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