and coming up next...

Well, I saw an interesting news article last night. It was on a new format for a band of online stores. It was three (I think) stores that joined forces to create an online virtual mall. The patron walks into the store and wanders around to shop. Whatever you look at is described, but when you look at it, you can see the actual packaging. When you check out, you go to more "normal" web pages.

One of the participants is Amazon, so I'd expect the thing to go. There was another store that I'd heard of, but I didn't quite know what they sold. (It just seemed like a store when they were wandering through on the news article.)

I mention all this because this could be the shape of things to come for libraries. It would take a while, but the first library of Runescape might be coming. The good news is that there would be the option of putting librarians in that sort of setting. It would feel odd, but you could do it.

That was the one thing that wasn't mentioned in the new article, incidentally. There were no virtual salesmen trying to get (I assume) real, actual commissions. Neither were there other guests in the store. That also will probably need to change.

My guess is that there is a huge number of people who would love to see everyone in the store with them. There would be another huge number of people who would love to be able to browse the store with just their friends. Then there would be people who would want to browse the store with no one around. Then there are the people (of course) who wouldn't want a virtual store at all.

Anyway, I saw the article and decided that in a few years libraries will be trying to figure out how to do that, too. I guess we'll see.