Remember '95? AOL was running version 2.0, modems strained to feature a single graphic, and publishers were just starting to hire kids for Gulags they liked to call "new media" departments.

My partners and I were pitching video programming about books and authors to B&N.

Ours was an unlikely trio. I'd resigned from Vanity Fair and was hoping to make a jailbreak from all of journalism. Carol Fitzgerald had relinquished her corner office as marketing czar of Mademoiselle. And Murray Bruce's documentary film business could have used a new client, or three.

Our idea was to create the MTV of books: a loop of three-minute interviews with writers, shown on a video monitor that was set on a table near the cash register of a bookstore, surrounded by those writers' new books. Objectives: a chance for readers to get to know the authors behind their favorite books -- and impulse purchases.

No one had ever made programming like this, so we financed our own pilot. Murray's friend Peter Mayle was just publishing A Dog's Life, a shaggy dog story told by the writer's mordant canine; we hiked out to Mayle's Long Island retreat, drank wine far too good for us, and filmed the writer and his master. Peg Tyre was then a newspaper reporter who was breaking into mystery fiction; we shot her with noir lighting and spooky shadows. And Stephen Gullo -- the weight-loss doctor who likes to ask patients, "Do you want to eat Italian or wear Italian?" -- was delighted to lift a rubberized model of five pounds of fat from his desk and gross us out.

With great difficulty, we worked our way up the B&N chain and got a meeting. There we laid out our content plan for the project we called The Book Report. B&N's questions: What would the monitors look like, who would service them, what would the volume be? B&N's preference: It would own the project, hire us, and let us shoot writers against a white brick wall. We passed.

Timing is everything. In '95, I'm told, AOL declined to buy 20 percent of Amazon.com for $500,000. In '96, AOL invested $500,000 -- surely not the same $500,000 -- in our enterprise, now an online book site.

Timing is also ironic. Six months after we launched "The Book Report," I became AOL's editorial director. And not long after that, B&N paid AOL $40 million to be its exclusive bookseller for four years. As the book guy, I was the obvious choice to run the editorial relationship; I built special features by the dozen to promote B&N's flagship writers.

These massively promoted mini-sites generated traffic, but not sales for B&N -- AOL members would avoid the right-on-the-screen, direct-to-the-book B&N link to go to Amazon.com and search for the same book. I often wondered: If B&N had the MTV of books in its stores, would readers be more inclined to think it was a tech-savvy company connecting readers with authors -- and might that have translated to a warmer reception for B&N.com?

Putting authors on camera is an evergreen idea. I'm quite sure B&N's files are filled with business plans and strategy memos on the subject, and they have the required MBA imprimatur, and someone at B&N found them much more sensible than anything we presented. But none of that mattered. Here it is, 2008, and B&N is just announcing its program.

In the end, timing really does matter -- with the exception of super-sizing and coffee, at no stage of the game has B&N been first. We were early with The Book Report, but with patience and courage and a ton of work, Carol transformed it into Bookreporter.com and then into a seven-site, multi-service Book Report Network. And, since 2004, I've been editing a cultural concierge service -- also probably a bit ahead of the curve -- called HeadButler.com.

In the end, we're all on our own timetables; maybe B&N will finally get it right. But if they don't, and if the Riggios announce that they urgently need compelling in-store videos, would we forget that train left the station long ago for us and answer the call? Oh, why not. Thirteen years after we made a pilot that's fast on the eye and fun on the ear, maybe they're ready to see it.