The world’s biggest internet retailer, Amazon.com, has bought the British web shop The Book Depository for an undisclosed amount. Amazon, that started as a web shop for books too, returns to its roots with this takeover.
Second Amazon-Crawford takeover
“We are very happy to have secured Amazon’s support and we hope to be able to continue our growth and improve and diversify our assortment of books”, says Andrew Crawford. For Crawford, The Book Depository is already the second ‘child’ he sells to Amazon: the same happened earlier to his creation Bookpages.
Fastest growing European book shop on-line
The Gloucester based online book shop has an estimated turnover of 135 million euro and is expected to have doubled that amount in the financial year that ended a few days ago. In 2009, the shop had a profit of 2.6 million euro for 69 million books sold. The shop, famous for not charging for delivery, serves over 100 countries worldwide and has a current assortment of over 6 million titles. TBD is regarded as one of the fastest growing internet book stores in Europe.