Abe Books Sold to Amazon Company

Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN).com on Friday said it has agreed to buy AbeBooks, an online marketplace for mostly used, rare, and out-of-print books. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Privately held AbeBooks, based in British Columbia, Canada, lists books from thousands of independent sellers worldwide, Amazon said. The online marketplace has more than 110 million books for sale. "As a leader in rare and hard-to-find books, AbeBooks brings added breadth and expanded selection to our customers worldwide," Russell Grandinetti, VP of books for Amazon, said in a statement.

The transaction is expected to close before the end of the fourth quarter. Amazon plans to have AbeBooks continue as a standalone operation based in Victoria, British Columbia. It will maintain all of its Web sites, including the ones in Canada with Canadian content, such as reviews of Canadian-authored books and interviews with that country's writers.

So far this year, Amazon has bought online fabric store Fabric.com and audiobook seller Audible. Fabric.com, based in Marietta, Ga., expands Amazon's offerings in the growing craft and hobby marketplace.

A recent report by Jeffrey Lindsay, analyst for Wall Street firm Sanford C. Bernstein, argued that Google and Amazon are in the best position to withstand the current economic downturn and become long-term winners on the Internet. – InformationWeek