Hey, I got escalated! A bit.

Dear Paul, We thank you for contacting the home of the best audio � Audible.com. I have answered your questions in the same order you asked them. 1- We use java for faster access on the page. This is a web development issue. I can send a request to our web development department for you if you like. 2- We limit the amount of time we have for open sessions. This way there is minimal lag and traffic jams. Please let me know if I have answered your questions.

That would be “no”.

That *sort of* answers my questions. 1. We're talking about javascript here, not Java -- but I'm guessing we both mean the same thing. "Faster access" I take to mean reducing the page-download size; which is nice, but probably negligible given the amount of images, etc. accompanying each page. Meanwhile, the user's experience (tabbed browsing, etc.) is pretty broken. And of course, users without Javascript enabled (for security reasons, or many speech-enabled browsers for the blind) are *completely* out of luck. 2. The question remains -- why should bookmarking a single book or category, for future reference, *require* a session at all? And if one is not present, why not create a "guest" session on the spot, as most sites do? If I want to point someone to a book on your site, I should be able to give them a direct link, to make their life easier and your sale more likely. In other words, http://www.audible.com/adbl/store/product.jsp?productID=BK_RAND_000266 should take someone right to "The Da Vinci Code", every time. And yes, forwarding this to the web team would be great. I'm a big fan of Audible in general, and a longtime customer, but the site is maddening.