Apple Acquired Pandora For Books Startup BookLamp to Take on Amazon

[RaduTyrsina]

According to a recent report coming from TechCrunch, Apple has acquired BookLamp start-up in order to boost its e-books effort and “beat Amazon at its own game.” Until today, BookLamp’s most well-known product was the Book Genome Project, a platform that allowed users to find suggestions for books to read based on natural language analysis of other titles.

Apple could use BookLamp’s know-how to improve its iBooks service with better recommendations, search, and categorization. Apple has confirmed TechCrunch's report of the acquisition, saying the following:

"Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."

While the official acquisition amount hasn't been made public, sources say Apple bought BookLamp’s employees and technology for a price between $10 and $15 million. Here are more details from the report:

"As is typical for many Apple M&A moves, the whole thing has been kept very quiet. Like “library voices” quiet. When BookLamp announced in April that it would be shutting down the Book Genome Project, it described the closure in vague terms, thanking users for being a part of its “journey to date” as the company “evolves its mission.”

To keep up appearances and throw people off the scent, BookLamp still has an office in Boise, and a second office in Cupertino, but none of the startup’s 10 employees work in either. “This was just the line created for them so that they didn’t have to explain what was happening. They’ve all moved to Apple,” our source says. “We were wondering when someone would come knocking and asking more questions.”

More and more Apple users are turning their attention towards eBooks instead of traditional ones and this is a field where the company needs to improve in order to retain them. It will be interesting to see how will Apple use BookLamps' technology to improve its own services and products.

Source: TechCrunch