I love these new Swickis! I haven't built one specifically for books yet, but it's "in the works." Swickis are easy to build, but require a lot of time and effort to customize properly. This one (as it states) is for finding My Amazon Bookstore.

Don't get me wrong, I like Amazon. After all they have excellent customer service, reasonable prices, a huge selection, and (mostly) free shipping. I even buy books there despite their policy of denying commissions to associates on their own purchases.

It's just hard to browse through a specific section to see "what's new" in your particular area(s) of interest.   Entering a new search term takes you back to the top of the Amazon heirarchy. ("Are you sure you wanted a book? How about some power tools?"

There's more to this remodeling than just a new look and feel. Most of the "Search Within This Category" boxes have been removed!

If you're looking for books about ancient Rome for example, and you want to look at Art, Architecture, Mythology, and Law -- your life just got a lot harder.

Harder, that is unless you've discovered The Whole Ed Mall

Update: It seems that many categories no longer really exist. Their "browse-field" numbers still return a page, but on closer inspection the page turns out to be a search-results page. These have no "search within this category" form.

The site is "under construction" Not in the sense that there are a lot of dead links and incomplete pages. We're just adding new content and features, and haven't quite reached the "headwaters" of Amazon's enormous resource yet.

Although the plan was to wait until the site was a little more complete before "rolling it out," this surprise move on Amazon's part is an opportunity we can't pass up.

You can usually find our pages by entering Browse-Amazon-Books, plus a general keyword or two in your favorite search engine. We currently prefer MSN Search, since they crawl the web agressively and tend to have the most up-to-date results. (The hyphens are not required, but usually give the best results.)

Searching within categories was one of the first "undocumented" features we developed. Who knew Amazon was about to abandon this useful search strategy? Good luck for us, and for you now that you've found our site!

Even though there is no guaratee that our search boxes will remain compatible with whatever new technology Amazon throws at us, they are based on components from standard links, and Amazon has a long history of continuing to support "old" links.

In any case, they all seem to work now. (28 APR 06)

You want to find a category @ Amazon, but you're not sure where to look. Do they even have that category? Where did they put it? Is it under "Apples" or "Oranges," or perhaps "Fruit Salad?"

The sad fact is, it's probably scattered about in several places. Now, you can reach the appropriate category page(s) in just two clicks!

Just enter a general search term in our category search box, like this one: Biography. There you will find a number of choices without "drilling down" through the improbable labyrinth Amazon.com has constructed.

Buried deep in their pages Amazon.com has a couple hundred or so RSS feeds for their top ten items in some of their most general categories. We've resyndicated them in a more browser-friendly form for your amusement.

The real news is that we've learned from this experiment how to "burn" feeds from "any" category page, and were deploying those in a seemingly random fashion. "Soon" you will be able to see the top 20 Amazon bestsellers in your favorite categories right in your news aggregator.

Nobody claims Amazon.com is fast.

I don't think Al Gore was delusional on the point of "inventing the internet." although I'm pretty sure Ronald Reagan thought he was George Gipp at times. Anyway, I hope everyone understands that I am not speaking literally when I say "I invented Ajax."

What I actually means is that I figured out a lot of the founding principles of Ajax before I actually heard of the standard. Anyway, these pages load "very fast," even on dial-up connections.