"It was the biggest aspidistra in the world" - Gracie Fields

Mega booksite Amazon has registered a stack of non book related URLs which show it's getting into the Arthur Daley*, and possibly the Gerald Ratner* business.

It has recently registered the following URLS: NEWCARSAMAZON.COM, USEDCARSAMAZON.COM, SELLCARSAMAZON.COM, CARCLASSIFIEDSAMAZON.COM, PARTSAMAZON.COM, LUXURYAMAZON.COM and JEWELRY-AMAZON.COM.

The margins on this sort of clobber certainly beat the hell out of the book business.

And given that Amazon has such a reach with its current Web site, we've no doubt whatever that it has other, similar, cunning plans up its corporate sleeves. ®

*For non-UK readers, information on Brit TV dodgy car dealer Arthur Daley can be found here (http://www.minder.org/mindsong.htm), while info on Gerald Ratner can be found here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/archive/trouble/ratner.htm).