I love amazon.com. I know I am a pawn in their evil consumerist schemes, but I find myself using amazon.com more and more. Here are some of the things I like about amazon.com.

• Great prices on new books and if you spend more than $25 the shipping is free.
• Excellent inventory and a centralized place to find books to link to in blog posts.
• The way that you can use it as a research tool for books in an area. When you look up one book that you know is a good example of what is out there on a certain topic, amazon will list several other books that are related. Of course they do this in the hopes that you will buy even more books, and I sometimes do! But I have found it to be a very helpful way to get quick general surveys of the literature available on a certain topic.
• The ability to create a wish list to keep track of books that I want to read in the future. You can rank each book based on the priority level that you want to read it. The rationale for this is similar to the rationale for using del.icio.us, because you can have access to it anywhere you can get on a computer. Plus, other people can find your amazon wish list and buy stuff for you. If you want to see an example of a wish list, or keep up with the books that I am interesting in reading at some point you can check out my amazon wish list here.

What about you? Are there any other uses that you have found for amazon.com or sites like it?

Full disclosure: Amazon.com did not pay me any money to write this post. (But if anyone from amazon.com out there wants to send me a gift card, I would definitely be open to that!)