Elliott Bay Book Company just announced on Twitter that they're starting a Flickr Pool. Right now, it has some photos of the new space, but they want people to post any photos they have of the old store, too. So if you have any photos from author events or anything else in the old space, you should put them in their Flickr Pool. It'd be nice to have an online museum for the old Elliott Bay space, even as we prepare for the new one.

Elliott Bay's the last of the major bookstores in town to get into social media. University Book Store has had a blog for a while, but they've spruced it up recently, and it's been focusing primarily on their brand-new Espresso Book Machine. Their Twitter feed seems to be lying fallow now, though their events feed is still running frequently.

In 2009, Third Place Books launched an informative, fun Twitter feed, and the bookstore has an interesting blog, too. Plus, Robert Sindelar, Third Place's managing partner, has been an avid Twitterer for several months now, and I've linked to the Espresso Book Machine blog at Third Place a few times recently. Third Place is the store with the best grasp of what social media can do for them. But other Seattle book institutions are doing a great job online, too. I check in on both Seattle Public Library's blog and the Hugo House's blog every day.

There's a lot of room for improvement across the board. I'd love to see a Seattle bookstore reach the level of Powell's web presence, which is packed with new stuff all the time: Author interviews, author guest-blogs (which Seattle Mystery Bookshop does quite well, by the way), and book news. Why bookstores aren't streaming their readings on the internet, too, is beyond me. Author readings are an incredible resource, and I've yet to see a bookstore that has successfully exploited their readings on the internet. The best so far? Pilot Books, which posts YouTube videos (albeit YouTube videos with horrible sound quality) of almost all their readings online.