This actually isn't all that unusual, and there's nothing sinister about it. Amazon does the same thing; try changing http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-ebo

This actually isn't all that unusual, and there's nothing sinister about it. Amazon does the same thing; try changing http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-ebook/dp/B000FC11A6/ to http://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash/dp/B000FC11A6/ People like seeing friendly, human-readable URLs. But it's bad practice to depend on them--if the title changes for some reason, you can break old links. That's why these URIs include both a human-readable description (which is ignored) and the unique ID of the resource, which is what's really used to render the relevant page.