Execution happens at ebb tide, when the hype waves have receded offshore. I was looking for The Self-Made Tapestry and found that Barnes and Noble Online now lets you search inventory of its local stores, enables you to reserve the book online for pick-up at the store, and even tells you in what section of the store it can be found. I wish that the local bookstores had this capability, but they don’t yet.
The last feature is particularly helpful for those who prefer books that aren’t clearly in one subject area. Is The Computational Beauty of Nature in Biology, Math, or Computer Science? Is The Printing Press as an Agent of Change in History, Sociology, or someplace else? Much time has been spent wandering bookstore aisles in search of books without an obvious category; this is one reason that I buy a lot of books online (of course, they could always reshelve sections on Social History of Technology and Computational Biology…).
By the way, they didn’t have Self-Made Tapestry, so I bought Acquiring Genomes instead, which is on the Lynn Margulis theory that cell organelles used to be free-swimming critters.