Mashable reports that Amazon and Facebook are now enabling you to link your accounts:

Now Amazon users will be able to link their Facebook account to their Amazon account. At the outset, this will allow Amazon to show you recommendations based on your Facebook interests and activity.

This integration will also help you figure out what kinds of gifts your friends might like by letting you better search for your Facebook friends’ Amazon Wish Lists and by pulling in information from your friends’ profiles.

They take the new feature for a test-drive, too. The privacy issues here are staggering.

Meanwhile, as a rebuttal to The Nation's recent negative piece about Amazon, The New Republic has published a pro-Amazon piece:

As a child growing up in suburban Baltimore—not exactly a backwater!—I felt keenly the lack of ready access to the books that I wanted. (Remember the joke of a selection at your local mall’s Waldenbooks?) And with the quirkier independents—such as the great Louie’s to which I paid tribute above—you were at the mercy of the owner’s idiosyncrasies, which meant that you might find shelves stocked with contemporary poetry but nothing by, say, Tolstoy.