How did I not know about this? (Reserving library books directly from Amazon pages, that is)

I've been smugly reserving books online from the lie-berry for ages, but somehow I missed this litte Java bitlet that's been out for over a year. Try it yourself: Go drag and drop the bookmark for your public library onto the toolbar in your browser, find a book on Amazon you want to read, then click and go. (You'll find Seattle Public Library's bookmark under iPac here.)

Amazing. I've written so much marketing crap professionally over the last few years about XML and Web services and how the world would be transformed by these new universal standards and the interchangeability of all kinds of information across all sorts of formats blah blah blah blah blah. But... it's happening. And often in ways that make life incrementally better and (more importantly) not always in the direction of corporate interests, thanks to the fact that the soul of technology seems to still be guarded by lazy, good-hearted, libertarian-leaning nerds.

Like Amazon and the producers of library software never meant to support this sort of thing. And that's really cool. Or, more eloquently:

There is a paradox at the heart of web services: A) They work because they use established, universal standards, and yet B) they produce the best results in unanticipated circumstances. We expect standards to be about certainty, but web services standards build a foundation for constant innovation and change.