The new Amazon feature requires that you be logged in as a customer (i.e., that you already have an Amazon password), accomplished by cookies on one's own machine, but necessitating login on a 'foreign' or public computer. It's been getting a lot of play lately in news and in blogs --here's part of Jon Udell's recent post:
I own a copy of Tesla: Man Out of Time. The other day, I was mentioning to someone that, according to that book, some of Nikola Tesla's writings are still classified. This query [tesla classified list] finds the passage I was remembering. Awesome! Now the physical book I bought from Amazon is more valuable to me. Its printed index has been augmented by a vastly more capable online index.
Once one has done an Amazon search and found a toothsome book, the next question is: do we HAVE the book? The bookmarklet below does a lookup in Annie (grabs the ISBN from Amazon and resubmits it to annie.wlu.edu, then shows the result of the search as an Annie window). Very cool.
Clicking on this link won't do anything --just DRAG it to where it says Links on your browser's menubar (you'll be prompted to agree to something unsafe... be brave...):
(see other bookmarklets: OED, Science 1996-, Wikipedia, Google)
22 December
Seeking some means to search my own stuff, it occurred to me that google might help. Here's what I've put together, satrting from a [bookmarklet] utility that allows you to make a bookmarklet for a particular searchable site, from bookmarklets.com. Here's a MetaBookmarklet, which allows you to create on the fly a bookmarklet for a site that passes the search string (drag each to the LINKS, as above):
make a bookmarklet
And here's one I made to get at stuff I have in home.wlu.edu:
search home.wlu.edu...and another for acadproj:
acadproj search