Techcrunch is reporting that Amazon is acquiring AbeBooks. Abe was actually around before the world wide web when it was a tool for used book stores to find used and rare books at stores across the country. It’s current website let’s end users do the exact same search.
What’s very interesting, and not mentioned by techcrunch, is that the company is Canadian and will be keeping their Canadian presence. This is interesting because Amazon doesn’t currently have a Canadian presence because of some legal issues. If they did, then they’d be subject to Canadian content laws regarding the percentage of Canadian book titles they sell on Amazon.ca. I don’t know how they could have structured the deal that the two entities are separate yet not (though I’m not as crafty as corporate lawyers).
maybe the crafty lawyer girlfriend knows how they did it :)
EC2 is based in South Africa. I heard that if Amazon wanted to do a similar kind of project that’s not really about selling books (e.g. some other kind of Amazon Web Service) then they could sort out the legal issues and open a development centre up north. IANAL either though. :-)