Over at mediabistro.com, Jesse Kornbluth considers Barnes & Noble's new multimedia "Studio," developing content about books and writers for online multimedia, and recalls how he pitched them that idea back in 1995:

"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."

Kornbluth and his partners wound up with a $500,000 investment from AOL to turn their idea into a website, which Carol Fitzgerald slowly but surely built up into Bookreporter.com (where, full disclosure, I once temped for a week). "We're all on our own timetables," he shrugs. "Maybe B&N will finally get it right."