So you want to buy a book. Maybe you’re too busy to stop off at the local bookshop. There’s a funny moment in Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road, the charming 1970 collection of letters between a New York writer and the London bookstore manager from whom she would order books by mail, in which Hanff explains that England only seems a long way from lower Manhattan; in fact, walking to the mailbox is a lot easier than trekking all the way uptown to Barnes & Noble.

Or maybe you’re not even sure which book you want. So you boot up your computer, dial in to your Internet provider, and connect to Amazon.com — the book-selling Web site that claims to have “Earth’s Biggest Selection.” It’s there on the welcome screen that you’ll see a list of the current “Hot Books,” on which you can find a novel you’ve vaguely heard of but never got around to reading: Arthur S. Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, now out in paperback, for example.