I like Mashable's take on Shelfari being purchased by Amazon.
Mainly,
I’ve looked at Shelfari several times over the course of its existence, and it always seemed like a cute project that’ll never make it big. Sometimes, however, it’s not only about the size of your community; the big players in your corner of the market can make a big difference.
Thus, Shelfari has been acquired by Amazon; probably not because it has a huge community, but because Amazon needed a book-oriented social network and acquiring Shelfari was the easiest, fastest, or least cash intensive way to do it.
A good lesson to be learned for all those running niche social networking sites.
I personally use goodreads as my bookworming social network.
It will be interesting to see how Shelfari does compared to Librarything and Goodreads with it's new association with such a big player like Amazon.
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Shelfari always seemed to me to be a really sophisticated operation for its size. They were one of the first companies to have their facebook app data actually sync with their main website data. Moreover, they managed to get Amazon in as an early, early investor. Often people caution against taking a strategic investment from a potential acquirer very early in the game, but it seems to have worked for Shelfari.