In many ways, buying AbeBooks is almost the antithesis of of what Amazon has done lately with pushing into electronic books with the Kindle and hosting Web 2.0 services like EC2, S3, and its recently launched Flexible Payment Service.

AbeBooks has generally stuck to its roots, by creating a thriving marketplace for rare and used book sellers worldwide. It is not clear if there will be any direct benefits of this acquisition by Amazon for the merchants on AbeBooks, though chances are that Amazon is going to start integrating the AbeBooks inventory into its own store. This will give the AbeBooks sellers access a far larger market to sell to than just the AbeBooks community, though many of them were already listing their inventory on Amazon (and other services like Alibris and Biblio.com anyway).

Currently, there are over 110 million books from over 13,000 sellers available on the site. Besides AbeBooks, the company also runs the book search aggregation site BookFinder and provides a sales and inventory management through Fillz.com.

AbeBooks also has a very active user community. Judging from the email AbeBooks send out to its sellers, it would seem that nothing much is going to change on the site for now and that the management team at AbeBooks is also going to remain in place.