The Y-AXIS LIVE!

As a person who buys loves to buy books every now and then, I have faced a constant nag. The stores in the town sell books that in their judgment, will move. They are not necessarily the books that match my taste or are the best. There are many occasions I just spend considerable time in a store and decide there’s nothing worthwhile to buy.Quite simply, there is not a single place where I can know about books, discuss them, and buy them right there.Not upto now at least.

My quest to know about books on marketing, business in general, great companies, business legends and so on got me connected to Shelfari some months back. Social networking to me till that point only meant leaving a few Orkuts scraps in iNcOmPrEhEnSiBlE blob of words and so on. Gradually I started following Shelfari and though I do notice that the level of action is not very high, I love the site for the books specific focus and the ability to have user provided reviews, discussions etc. If you are half sure on a title, ask ‘do you suggest I buy this book’ to folks who own that title.

It was announced today that Shelfari is has followed Skype into being another web property to be acquired by Amazon. Shelfari has seemingly good synergy and complimentary offerings with Amazon book section. It will be safe to assume that Amazon would use the social elements of Shelfari platform to generate book sales. Amazon would be able to tap discussions on books, see get to see early on demand being created by user generated reviews and ratings, opinions and discussions.Book lovers would almost certainly be able to buy those books there. Is social networking taking a new meaning here? Would Amazon use this platform to make people chat on other merchandise it sells?

Logical query: Are we going to see domain specific social networking sites getting consolidated by large ‘downstream’ or ‘upstream’ or ‘proximate’ players’?