"Great news for the UK ebook market: Sainsbury's is our new shareholder!" So said Anobii chief executive Matteo Berlucchi in his tweet this morning announcing that supermarket Sainsbury's had bought a controlling share in the business for £1.

Sainsbury's has, of course, taken on HMV's stake in the company (or 'relieved' HMV of its comittment, as one trade wag put it). People might quibble with the low valuation, but essentially Berlucchi has swapped an investor that was running out of money and time, with one that has deep pockets and time enough.

Anobii (Latin for bookworm btw) has an interesting history. Earlier this month it was revealed in Penguin's response to the Department of Justice that Anobii was Project Z, the joint venture imagined by publishers as a way of thwarting Amazon's continuing dominance of this e-reading market and publishers' impending disintermediation. But as I said in an earlier blog, if Anobii was 'Project Z', it hasn't worked (yet). Thought at least it is alive. The other part of this--'Project Muse' or the US site Bookish--has so far failed to launch at all.

But though it existed prior to its acquisition by HMV and the three publisher partners, Random House, HarperCollins, and Penguin, Anobii is really a start-up, and should be treated as such. The cold facts are that HMV spent £2.1m acquiring and investing in Anobii in its last fiscal year end (to end April 2011) and lost close to £1m. We do not have updated figures, but Berlucchi has been busy. He has emerged as something of a thought-leader in publishing circles marshalling the forces against DRM (at conferences and on this website), and the site has relaunched in beta.

No-one who has come across Berlucchi will worry about his ambitions, and it is to be hoped that Sainsbury's, along with the publishing investors, truly back this very hungry bookworm.