Why don't booksellers offer their best customers a personal shopper service that will make recommendations that are unique to the subscribed customer based on the individual customer's reading tastes and even alert them to upcoming publications and readings by their favorite authors? Amazon does a limited and crude self-serve version of this concept. Shouldn't a far more knowledgeable and much more personable bookseller be able both in person and through technology to do better?

Shouldn't it be possible to have a better and more personable interaction with a favorite author than standing in a cue for an hour or more only to experience a brief, expedited moment of resolution in a hurried autograph?

Individual author readings are wonderful, but wouldn't having a forum like SIFF - but for books - where multiple, new and independent authors and virtual unknowns could introduce their work and themselves to the audience and interact with them in generous question and answer sessions be even more of a fulfilling feast than the occasional desert of a single, well-established author's reading with no Q&A.

Booksellers would do well to enrich every aspect of the experience of books by engaging the mind and imaginations of the readers in ways that connect the experience of reading the book with the world of experiences it can and does create beyond its pages. Add depth and scope where it should have always been. Add connections where they naturally have always wanted to be.

Paul, what do you think of Writer.ly?