Serendipity

In books and otherwise, there's lately been something in the digital air about serendipity, human filtering and the like. In a post this morning, Joe Wikert questions online booksellers' utility in encouraging the same discovery and serendipity in book buying as physical stores do. I am not normally one to come to the defense of Amazon, and I definitely do not foresee the imminent demise of brick-and-mortar stores, but the answer I came up with hit me as a bit of a revelation:

Not limited to instances within its own site, Amazon supports serendipitous book discovery within the whole of the Internet.

Anytime I find a reference to an interesting book -- no matter where that reference occurs -- I can quickly click on the Amazon bookmark in my browser, do a quick search for the title and in one more click, add it to my shopping cart. Once in the cart, I can go back to whatever I was doing and save the book to buy or read about later. I have dozens of books saved like this, each just a couple more clicks away from owning and each discovered from totally different sources. Sources limited only by what I'm looking at on the web, which is in itself just as extensive a subject list as I might wander in bookstore shelves.