I've always found amazon.com more useful as a database than as a store. But now, with the new feature that allows one to search inside of a book...I have to admit that I'm abashedly unabashedly over the moon about this. Example: tonight I needed the page number for a quote in a Walter Benjamin essay (because, as a member of the union, I'm required to produce one Benjamin reference per article that I write). I had the quote, but bad, short-sighted researcher that I am, I didn't have the page number. So: to amazon dot com, locate the right book, type a unique phrase from the quote I need into the "search inside this book" box, and there it is: the quote, the page number and the entire page itself. I'll not gush more, lest I embarrass us all, but this is a pretty great thing for those of us without bibliographic memories. (Wait, have I posted about this before?)

-kris