(MONEY Magazine) – Site: Amazon.com Books (www.amazon.com/). Think of this Website as an online megabookstore.

Cost: Free browsing. You pay by credit card, check or money order for any books you order, plus shipping charges of $3.95 and up.

Highlights: If you enjoy hanging out with the literati at the espresso bar in one of today's trendy cafe-bookstores, this site probably isn't your cup of latte. But if you would like having access to a mind-boggling 1 million titles that you can purchase from the comfort of your home--at discounts of up to 30% on bestsellers--you've come to the right place.

Entering this site, which is run by a former investment banker, is like walking into a regular bookstore. You're immediately bombarded with images of hot titles like Tom Clancy's Executive Orders ($20.96, 25% off publisher's list price) and Anne Rice's Servant of the Bone ($18.20, 30% off), as well as books that have been reviewed in the latest issues of the New York Times Book Review, Wired or The Atlantic.

If your tastes run beyond what appears on bestseller lists, you can search for additional works by entering an author's name, a book title or a subject area. Typing "taxes" into the site's search function yields a list of more than 100 books, including The Price Waterhouse Personal Tax Advisor (Irwin, $13.45, 10% discount).

Bibliophiles will love Amazon.com's Eyes section. On this page of the site, you describe your favorite authors or topics. Then, whenever a title that jibes with your interests is about to be published, Eyes notifies you by e-mail. A request for Eyes to watch for works by comic novelist David Carkeet, for example, would trigger an e-mail that his new opus, The Error of Our Ways (Henry Holt, $25--alas, no discount), will be available in January.

One downside: Unless you pay $8 plus $2.95 per book for overnight shipping, your order usually takes three to seven days to arrive.

--R. Michael Terry