With the launch of iBooks several years ago and with the huge lawsuit that Apple has faced over price fixing for its e-books, it’s safe to say that this is an area that Apple is interested in. Well it looks like the iBooks ecosystem could be getting a boost, thanks to Apple’s acquisition of a company called BookLamp.
If you’re not familiar with BookLamp, it is basically a service that some have compared to Pandora, except for books. What this means is that the service will be able to recommend books to users based on your reading preference, thanks to exclusive algorithms developed by the company.
As it stands, Amazon currently has a similar feature where they recommend customers books (and other products) based on your previous purchases and previous searches, so by offering up a similar feature to iBooks, it could help make the ecosystem more compelling. In a boilerplate statement released to TechCrunch, “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
According to one of their sources, the deal has been valued at around $10-15 million. It remains to be seen how exactly Apple will use BookLamp’s technology, but like we said earlier, an enhancement of their iBooks platform would make a lot of sense, but what do you guys think?
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