$20 a year is certainly reasonable. I use the site a lot for series information, not so much for searching by blurb, although they don't always have the series information correctly.
I was on the site was back in the beginning where users were pretty much the ones adding all the data, so it was only as good as the users who added it.
But it would be nice to have that search capability when you're trying to remember a book, but only remember main bits of the plot and not the author or title.