AbeBooks in sights of Amazon.com

BOOKLOVERS, if you have tears, prepare to shed them now. Amazon.com, the big US online retailer, has agreed to pay an unrevealed sum to acquire AbeBooks.com - in Doubleclick's opinion one of the internet's greatest assets.

We fear for Abe's future under the new ownership. AbeBooks, based in Canada, is the world's greatest resource of used, rare and out-of-print books. It contains listings supplied by 13,500 secondhand and antiquarian booksellers from all over the world - including several hundred from Australia.

If you want any book printed in the past 200 years or so, you're most likely to find it here. Those 13,500 booksellers regularly upload their catalogues to the AbeBooks database, providing information about every book, including condition and price.

You can explore this vast database via the website and place an order, and the book is usually in your hands a few days later, typically coming from some small but dedicated bookstore in Saskatchewan, Aberdeen or Bloemfontein.

Looking for a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby? The Book Collectors Library of Montreal has a "near fine" 1925 original signed by the author in "blue/black fountain pen showing a little blotter bleed", at $US17,750.

If you're not quite so particular, GrayGate Books of Monbulk, Victoria, can do you a more recent Penguin paperback edition at $1.10, plus postage, of course.

AbeBooks can steer you to pre-loved cookery books, history tomes, university textbooks, audiobooks, art books, poetry books - even technology books. Why pay $30 or $40 for a brand-new Windows XP for Dummies when an AbeBooks dealer will send you a near-new copy for a dollar or two?

We should also mention that AbeBooks is a substantial shareholder in LibraryThing: another thrice-blessed website for booklovers. That holding also seems set to pass into Amazon's control.

LibraryThing helps you catalogue your library, displays the results as either a list or as shelves full of covers (it has images of most recent titles on tap) and - should you so wish - puts you in touch with people with "eerily similar tastes" (in books, of course).

There are online discussion groups, book recommendations, tags to keep you informed on matters of great public interest such as religion, tea-drinking, yurts, Taoist philosophy, vampires and dogs.

Alas, all this appears threatened by the Amazon.com takeover. Doubleclick admires Amazon: it's our usual first stop for new books, and we find its service mostly excellent, delivery to Australia amazingly fast and prices low by antipodean standards.

It has promised to keep AbeBooks running as a standalone operation based in Victoria, British Columbia, and it swears it won't interfere with LibraryThing.

But - sigh! - good intentions in corporate takeovers are all too often overturned a few years down the track, as shareholders get restless.

Back in April 1999, Amazon.com announced it was buying Exchange.com, the parent of Bibliofind.com, described at the time (by Amazon) as "the premier online marketplace for hard-to-find, antiquarian, and used books".

Amazon executives promised to maintain it as an independent operation, but if you log on to the Bibliofind.com website today you'll find yourself swiftly redirected to Amazon's main site. The takeover has yet to pass the scrutiny of Canadian corporate regulators. For the good of us all, Doubleclick hopes the Canucks put the kybosh on the whole thing.

THE netbook phenomenon is growing daily as more manufacturers jump into the market for tiny, light portable computers pioneered by Asus's dinky little Eee.

Netbooks are low-cost lightweight gadgets with displays ranging from 8in to 10in, many powered by the Atom, a tiny new chip from Intel with very low power consumption.

Since the launch of the Eee, US maker Hewlett-Packard has launched its Mini-Note netbook, and Taiwan's Acer has weighed in with another rival, the Aspire One.

Japan's Toshiba says it will have an upmarket netbook in Australia before the end of the year and Chinese maker Lenovo says it will launch a model in late September. Lenovo's IdeaPad S10 will weigh 1kg and have a 10.2in LED backlit display, 1GB of memory and an 80GB hard disk.

davfrith@gmail.com