Shelfari

» see shelfari.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

shelfari sat in the part of internet history i could read about but did not join. the english-language book social network was a kindle-store satellite layer running mostly inside the us, and even there it was a quiet community by the time i would have signed up for one. by 2009 my reading habit was already split between turkish bookshops and pdf scans, with no clear place to log shelves in a way amazon understood.

the site launched on 11 october 2006 in seattle, founded by josh hug and kevin beukelman. the model was a virtual bookshelf with social grain on top, where you marked the books you owned and the ones you were reading and then followed people whose shelves looked interesting. it had book groups and reviews and tag clouds that mapped your reading toward neighboring titles. there were two louder competitors in the space already, librarything from 2005 and goodreads from 2007. shelfari was the third entrant.

amazon bought shelfari in august 2008 for an undisclosed sum. inside amazon the site got wired into the kindle product as the source for a feature called the public shelf, where a kindle reader's library could be surfaced for other users to browse. for the next few years shelfari was the amazon-internal social book layer, integrated into kindle pages and book metadata. goodreads was the louder external competitor running on its own.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how amazon killed it ~

amazon bought goodreads in march 2013 for a price never publicly stated, somewhere around 150 million by industry estimates. that purchase put two book social networks inside the same company. for almost three years amazon ran both, with goodreads as the public-facing reader network and shelfari as the kindle-side metadata layer. in january 2016 amazon told shelfari users that their shelves would be migrated to goodreads. the formal merger date was 16 march 2016. the migration completed that june and shelfari.com went dark.

the migration was uneven. shelves moved over but not all reviews. some users complained that years of tag work did not survive the import. the kindle integration that had used shelfari as its backend was rebuilt against goodreads. the website redirected briefly and then returned a goodbye page that stayed up for a few months before the domain stopped resolving.

~ the long tail ~

shelfari is now remembered as one of three book social networks that competed for the same readers in the late 2000s, two of which amazon bought. goodreads won the consolidation because it was bigger when amazon arrived. the lesson tucked under this is that when a single company owns several products in the same category, the older one rarely survives the round of consolidation that follows. amazon kept the seattle property for almost eight years before deciding it had been buying the wrong network all along.

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