Today we hear that Amazon has invested the book social networking website Shelfari. It hardly ironic that Shelfari is based in Seattle, home of its new investor. The site is interesting and enables individuals to promote their own shelves of books, build reading groups, develop book review blogs and generally socially interact around books. Their current model is driven by users promoting books which are then bought at a commission from Amazon, so the Amazon tie- in makes sense to all.
Looking at the site the cynic would envisage lots of spoof reviews and promotions but this doesn’t appear to be the case todate. It will be interesting to see how the service now develops and where the reviews are ‘trusted’ and how close they get to Amazon in their development.
www.shelari.com
