Victoria-based Abebooks is celebrating its 10-year anniversary.
It recently bought a share in LibraryThing.com as a birthday present to itself.
LibraryThing.com is a pretty cool project. It pulls bibliographic data from Amazon.com and other sources and lets users attach comments, tags, ratings and reviews to the books they catalogue in their virtual library.
According to Quill and Quire, Abebooks “is looking to integrate LibraryThingís user statistics and features into its own site ñ creating, say, Amazon-style customer recommendations.” It will be interesting to see how the adoption stage of this project goes. I currently use Amazon’s Listmania to make my book recommendations and share booklists. I use Amazon.ca because it has Canadian source information and pricing so I likely won’t gravitate to LibraryThing.com, unless of course the service just rocks.
In other Abebooks news, they are running a contest to visit 10 booksellers around the world. There are smaller prizes too. Utne is the contest sponsor. You have to collect a bookmark with an instant entry code from a participating bookseller.
Here’s the contest goods. It runs until July 15.