The story
In 1995, AbeBooks was founded by Rick and Vivian Pura, and Keith and Cathy Waters. It was incorporated in 1995 and launched its websites in 1996, initially including listings for only four bookstores. The company name "Abebooks" is derived from their original name, "Advanced Book Exchange". From the late 1990s to 2005, AbeBooks had reseller agreements with eBay, Half.com, Barnes & Noble.com, BibliOZ.com and Amazon.com, allowing AbeBooks to market and sell booksellers' books through those channels; these agreements were dissolved in 2005. AbeBooks currently has a reseller agreement only with Amazon.com.
In 2001, AbeBooks acquired Germany's JustBooks GmbH online book marketplace, which helped the company expand into the German, French and British online bookselling markets. In 2002, the founding partners were bought out by German media company Hubert Burda Media. In 2004, the company expanded its model to include new books, and acquired the Spanish company IberLibro, to better serve Spanish language markets. In 2005, it acquired BookFinder.com, an American book price comparison service. In 2006, the company acquired Fillz, a book-inventory and order-management company, and purchased a 40% stake in LibraryThing in May, a social networking and book cataloging website for bibliophiles.
In June 2008, AbeBooks was awarded the British Columbia Technology Industry Association Impact Award for Leadership in Social Responsibility for its charitable activities, literacy initiatives, and commitment to environmental friendliness in its business practices.
In December 2008, the company was sold to Amazon.
In 2018, the company announced it would no longer fully support sellers from a number of countries, including South Korea, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Several hundred other sellers pulled their inventories from the AbeBooks site in protest.
AbeBooks is headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, with its European office in Düsseldorf, Germany. The company manages regional websites for North America, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and Spain. Most of its inventory consists of used books, including rare, signed, first editions or out of print books. It has been named one of British Columbia's Top Employers every year since 2008.
From Wikipedia’s article on AbeBooks, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3