New Architect:

"For years, I've used Amazon.com as a research tool. I can quickly look up the ISBN number for a book, find its publisher, find all of the books that an author has written, track the recent increase in popularity on resume-polishing manuals, and chart the dramatic fall in computer book sales. The Amazon Web site is more than a retail catalog, it's a bibliographic database. Let's look at how Amazon could use Web services to exploit its role as a database."