The Whole Ed Mall

We are proud to offer the largest selection of books and other products available anywhere online in association with Amazon.com, a name you know and trust. But why would you want to shop with us instead of going directly to Amazon? It's a fair question, and one that far too many Amazon associates don't really answer. In a word, convenience.

Our pages may be spare, even Spartan, but you'll really appreciate the speed with which they load, especially if you are part of the 80% or so of internet users who have dial-up access. We spare no effort in optimizing our pages out of necessity. Our entire bookstore, in its current incarnation, is limited to ten megabytes (about 6 floppy disks) so we have to be extremely frugal with our bandwidth requirements.

We frequently need to find a very specific type of book, but not a particular known title, and we've found that Amazon's search leaves a lot to be desired. The best technique is to drill down to the appropriate Amazon category and search that specific section. Drilling down is the hard part. Amazon's category hierarchy is arcane at best, and all too frequently just plain wrong. Our interface allows you to "Search Amazon Book Categories" for a general term, then zero in on more specific terms. This function is completely absent from Amazon's site.

Our pages include original content designed to help you find what you are looking for. We include appropriate keywords, explanations of relevant "buzzwords," custom searches, links to Amazon "Guides," "Listmania," and "Reviews" pages and other links to some of the more obscure features of the Amazon.com user interface.

We can't always respond to individual e-mail requests (our e-mail address has been published online continuously for over five years, and the amount of "spam" we recieve is phenomenal). However, we do try to incorporate suggestions and even individual searches whenever we can. For example, try this search for "Mayan long count" based on a visitor's request.

We appreciate your interest in our site, and we'd like to reward you with a couple of free utilities we've found to be very useful. (In the interest of full disclosure, we should mention that the Amazon searches in these products include our associate id, so we recieve a small commission whenever you make purchases through them, although it doesn't cost you one extra dime)

Alexa is an internet search company (recently acquired by Amazon) that factors user-input into it's ranking scheme. The toolbar is well-bahaved software (i.e. not resource-hungry, easily un-installed, works on all Windows versions) and it provides several useful functions:

• Pop-up Manager efficiently blocks annoying pop-ups (can be disabled at will)
• Instant access to Alexa search (Powered by Google) with these unique features:
  • Site Info function, provides lots of relevant details about sites you visit
  • Related links. Good idea, but spotty in execution.
  • Tell a friend. Easily e-mail URLs to anyone.
  • The Wayback Machine shows you how sites looked "back when"

Some anti-virus and firewall programs detect the Alexa toolbar and identify it as "spyware". The toolbar does relay some information about your browsing to Alexa.com, in order to improve the quality of it's search. This is not necessarily a bad thing, given Alexa Internet Privacy Policy, but it can be a little disconcerting if it occurs without warning. For more detailed discussion, see Is Alexa Spyware?

Based on an idea from Amazon Hacks, these scripts tweak your Windows registry to allow you to search Amazon or Alexa from your browser address bar.