We still don’t know what caused Vancouver-based Shelfie to abruptly stop operations and close in late January. A poster child among publishing startups, the three-year-old service that sold and provided ebooks for owners of print editions had around 2,000 participating publishers and appeared to have a bright future. And then it didn’t.
When the sudden announcement came, however, Shelfie’s fellow Canadian company Rakuten Kobo stepped up and gave users of Shelfie an extra month to collect ebooks in their accounts before the system closed. Kobo had made a similar move with a different bookseller earlier in the year, essentially allowing customers of South Africa’s Exclusive Books to move their ebook collections over to Kobo’s system—and Kobo gained new customers in the process, of course.
Now, this month, after silence in the wake of Shelfie going under, there’s news that Kobo has bought the Shelfie technology. What’s up? Think of it as a double-play that gains Kobo both consumer data and recommendation capacity.
- Data: One beauty of the Shelfie system has always been that it reunites publishers with print consumers. If you bought a paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1980, you disappeared without a trace from the publishing industry with that book under your arm. But if you turned up at Shelfie in 2016, asking whether an ebook copy of Mockingbird was available to bundle with your 1980 paperback, suddenly you’d been re-spotted by the industry, which could capture your data. A largely unsung part of what Shelfie’s Peter Hudson and Mary Alice Elcock built was this “reader recovery” system: wooing data-rich consumers to come within info-harvesting reach of our modern, data-thirsty business.
- Recommendation: As Shelfie matured, it graduated from just providing ebook editions of titles readers owned in print to developing recommendations based on consumers’ bookshelves. The term Shelfie referred to the photo you took of your bookshelf and uploaded to the company, whose system would read the spines of the books pictured on your shelf, letting you know which ones were available in ebook editions and also recommending other reads you might like.
Bottom line: The terms of Kobo’s acquisition of Shelfie’s “brains”—its tech—haven’t been disclosed. But we see this as one of the canniest buys of the year. Michael Tamblyn, Kobo’s CEO, is clever at bringing capabilities and “other people’s audiences” into the fold this way. In February, Kobo created a Kobo Plus subscription with the Netherlands’ Bol.com. And in January, Kobo became the Tolino system’s operating-tech partner. Always forthright about seeing the US market as dominated by Amazon, Tamblyn continues to build Kobo’s reach internationally. And as he makes recommendation-and-data moves like the Shelfie acquisition, authors may find Kobo an increasingly compelling reason to question the wisdom of Amazon exclusivity.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
