Flipkart buys book recommendation, review, discovery social app maker weRead

Flipkart, one of the leading online bookstore in India recently announced that it has acquired a book recommendation and review platform company – “weRead”. These days, Flipkart is trying to identify itself as general eCommerce portal selling items on various categories and not just an online bookstore. Even otherwise, this acquisition makes more sense to Flipkart as it adds value to its core business of selling books online.

weRead was launched by Bangalore based startup Ugenie, and is a social book discovery engine that enables users to recommend and discover books, search for authors, rate and review books as well as share and network with other book lovers.

Back in August 2006, Ugenie received $5 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures and Sierra Ventures and was acquired by Lulu in August 2008. weRead’s social application is available on almost all popular social networks – Facebook, Orkut, Yahoo, MySpace and Hi5. It has registered 3 million readers and has 60 million books listed and users can also read some books online via weReader.

Flipkart, yet another Bangalore based Startup, kicked off as an online book store and now sells over 7 million book titles. These days its trying to become a general eCommerce portal by expanding its product categories to movies, music, games and mobile handsets.

With the acquisition of weRead, Flipkart gains overnight access to the highly potential social graph across various countries who have interests in reading and buying books. Also, Flipkart can make better use of user generated information such as detailed book reviews, social network friends who have marked a book as a favourite, user ratings of books. More importantly, buying book from weRead platform could be redirected to Flipkart.com portal instead of the current Amazon redirection.