LibraryThing enriches CIG portfolio
Jinfo Blog

30th January 2009

By Udo Hohlfeld

Item

What has LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com) in common with ProQuest, Dialog, AquaBrowser, Navtech, Sotheby's Institute of Art, Syndetic Solutions and Bowker? It now belongs to the Cambridge Information Group (CIG - http://www.cambridgeinformationgroup.com), a management and investment group. CIG has acquired more than twenty companies in the past five years. And it seems as if it is still hungry. CIG states that it has acquired a minority stake in LibraryThing. Amazon (http://www.amazon.com) owns about 40%, Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing, maintains to still own the majority of the company, so this leaves at least a 9% stake to CIG. For this CIG has made a good deal as it was assigned the exclusive right to distribute LibraryThing for Libraries (currently with 150 customers) through its Bowker (www.bowker.com) subsidiary. LibraryThing provides online book cataloging in a social networking context. Any user, no matter whether an individual or a library, can upload and publish a catalogue of books, with tags, reviews, images of book covers, and discuss topics of interest. On its website LibraryThing states to have more than thirty-five million books on its virtual bookshelves and to serve a community of about 609,000 book lovers. It just sa,ys to be the world's largest book club. CIG says it was a logical step to conduct this strategic investment as there is already a relationship in place with its subsidiary AcquaBrowser, which it bought in 2007. By adding LibraryThing for Libraries to its other offerings such as Bowker or ProQuest it is able to provide more Web 2.0 technologies to enhance and improve the efficacy of their book search and discovery efforts with tags, recommendations, reviews, and translations. For LibraryThing this investment has benefits as well as, according to Tim Spalding, the biggest weakness of his company, sales and marketing, can now be overcome with the expertise of CIG. This seems to be a typical win-win situation for CIG and LibraryThing. But what is with Amazon? Definitely, we can imagine that Amazon will benefit as well from a stronger LibraryThing by providing additional retail features and capabilities to a growing community of book lovers - we will see.

« Blog