Apple confirmed that it has acquired book recommendation start-up, BookLamp in the month of April to boost its e-book offerings.
TechCrunch, first reported the acquisition news, claims that the deal, which involved BookLamp’s employees and technology, would have cost Apple somewhere between $10 million and $15 million.
The Cupertino confirmed the news saying that Apple is always on an acquisition spree looking out for acquiring smaller technology companies from time to time. The company however does not believe in discussing its purpose or plans publicly.
CEO Tim Cook addressing Apple’s quarterly conference call for the third fiscal quarter of 2014 revealed that the company, over the past nine months, has gone for 29 small and big acquisitions in total.
Although BookLamp did not officially confirm the acquisition, it had earlier posted a statement on its website in April saying its services will no longer be available as the company tries to ‘evolve its mission.’
Based in Boise, Idaho, BookLamp is quite popular for it’s the Book Genome Project. The technology allowed users to find book suggestions on the basis of natural language analysis of other book titles. The platform analysed deep data about the subject matter of books in order to recommend related titles to the readers.
Apple is expected to combine BookLamp’s recommendations and analytics engine technology with its iBooks service to challenge its rival Amazon in the space. Last year, Amazon had acquired Goodreads, a reader-based social network and integrated it with its Kindle e-books service.
