John Philippe, CEO of Zephyr Salvo believes that SL is the harbinger of Web 3.0 (whatever happened to 2.0?), a kind of virtual reality where "Instead of, say, going to Amazon.com's web page, soon your Avatar will walk into the Amazon.com store and interact with personnel to find what you are looking for, just like you would at the mall. Soon it will be vital that your organization have a virtual online environment that your clients and customers can experience in order to do business with your company."

The world, virtual or real, doesn't seem to be quite there yet, but perhaps his vision isn't as farfetched as it might have seemed a while ago. There are shops in Second Life already starting to do this sort of thing.

Snowbooks is close to Philippe's vision: It is small RL publisher and an amazon associate sitting, as you might hope with a name like that, in a snowy sim. There are books on display with buttons offering you the chance to buy them via a website (mainly amazon, but Waterstones in at least one case too). Many of the books have a "read excerpt" option which gives you a notecard with an extract of the book. It might not be quite the same as flicking through the pages in the store yourself, but it is getting close.

Circuit City, in the IBM sims is broadly similar. At first glance it is a shop that looks like many others in SL, but on a slightly closer glance looks a bit more like a RL electronic goods store. In this shop you click on an item for sale and you get taken to a website that will offer the item for sale IRL, but there is no in-world list of specifications available.

Assuming HTML on a prim actually arrives another little step towards this ultimate vision will have been realised, as you will be able to buy RL items without leaving SL at all. If the doom-sayers about the economy are wrong and the L$ remains a stable currency who knows, perhaps you'll even be able to buy for your L$!

Thanks to Arlo Sands for the tip about Circuit City, and Jeffronius Batra for the original piece that pointed me at Snowbooks.

Edit: As you will see from the comments below other shops exist that do this sort of business. I wrote about the ones I knew of, I will undertake to visit and write a follow up article about others that I am made aware of.