[1] Shelfari users built virtual bookshelves of the titles they owned or had read, and could rate, review, tag, and discuss their books.

[5] In February 2007, Amazon invested $1 million in Shelfari,[6] and moved to acquire it a year later in August 2008.

[9] Shelfari was founded by RealNetworks alumni Josh Hug and Kevin Beukelman (both software developers), and Mark Williamson (who never joined the company[which?]

At the time, it planned on earning money by passing leads on to online booksellers and taking a 5 to 10 percent cut of resultant sales.

[10] Once Shelfari received its first equity fund raise in early 2007[6] the company grew to five employees, including software developer Kevin Durdle, designer Timothy Gray, and VP of marketing Dave Hanley.

Using wiki functionality users could edit each book's authors, title, publication data, table of contents, first sentence, and series.

Users could also combine redundant books into a single entry or add new titles not found in the catalog.

Jesse Wegman, writing in The New York Observer in October 2007, complained that because he had "accidentally failed to uncheck the approximately 1,500 names in my Gmail address book that Shelfari had helpfully pre-checked", the system caused invitations to be sent, contrary to his intentions but "ostensibly" from his own address, to his entire network of contacts.

[4] In November 2007, Shelfari was accused of astroturfing by Tim Spalding, the creator of LibraryThing, a competing social networking book site.