Jill Walker has had an interesting series of posts related to the privileging of Amazon through book links, and asked about developing methods of neutral linking.
I did some poking around, because it seemed to me that somebody must already be doing this. Yup. There's a group called USIN.org working on a "bibp://" protocol for links to books. They call it a "decentralized bibliographic service network." Basically, users could instruct their clients on what resource(s) to use for retrieving bibp links--from libraries to booksellers. (In the same way they can now specify mail clients for mailto: protocols, or LDAP servers for directory lookups.)
Problem is, it doesn't seem to be terribly active or visible. The IETF draft (Bibliographic Protocol Level 1: Link Resolution and Metapage Retrieval) was last updated in August of 2000. One of the participants in this project, Robert Cameron, wrote an article about it in 1997 for First Monday, entitled "A Universal citation Database as a Catalyst for Reform of Scholarly Publication."
So the question for me becomes how to get this type of project a little higher in the public consciousness, and more actively into the development pipeline. The potential is there, but if it's so far under the radar that nobody builds it into their systems, it won't help anyone.
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