Move Over, Yellow Pages!

By Andrea Sachs

This holiday season, let your fingers do the walking through the World Wide Web with a handy new tome, thepurplebook: the definitive guide to exceptional online shopping by Hillary Mendelsohn (Bantam; 672 pages). The author browsed through thousands of Internet shopping sites, then tested and organized 1,600 of them for the reader's convenience. In snappy reviews, Mendelsohn evaluates familiar sites such as amazon.com and exotic ones like travelinpets.com which "features pet car seats and restraints, vest carriers and backpacks." The book helpfully gives the phone numbers of websites, plus their shipping, gift-certificate and gift-wrap policies. --By Andrea Sachs