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I guess I should mention one more thing here. When I am looking for a book and have a title or author or ISBN, I invariably go to Amazon.com. And often buy from there also.
But there are a couple of things to remember about Amazon. First of all, they appear to be considering building a giant database with all your consumer preference info (based on a recent patent), and I'm sure that includes your book and product searches at Amazon. At some point, that info will be worth money, so if there's no legal protection, what would stop them from sharing your private info with another entity that has money? As far as I know, they haven't even promised to "do no evil"! ;-)
But more to a practical point, be aware that when you search for a book, and especially buy a book, Amazon seems to remember it in it's suggestions. So you might want to be especially careful when you are searching for or buying a book for a friend about pregnancy, marriage, divorce, death, your favorite health issue, kites, dogs, cats, or whatever. Once they think you like it, you'll never hear the end of it from them because they want to sell you more books like it (or similar to it), even if you are not interested. I guess it's no big deal, and I apologize to all the cat lovers out there, but to me it's a little annoying to keep getting recommendations for books about things like cats!
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