I'm reading the Jakob Nielson's Alertbox [1] and the corresponding User Comments [2] when an idea hit.
To explain the idea, you first need to understand what the articles are talking about. Briefly, Doc Searls switched linking to Amazon to Wordsworth and their revenue dropped; most people know how Amazon works, and don't want to bother learning how Wordsworth works, or with setting up an account there.The User Comment from Glenn Fleishman backs that up. ISBN.nu, [3] a price commparison of on-line booksellers. I came across the site quite a while ago and it's a neat service. But he has a similar problem as Doc Searls.
So I thought—what if a website gave the user a choice as to which on-line bookseller to use? If cookies are used, a site can store the user's preference for on-line bookseller to use and a link to a book points to some CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script that determines which bookseller to redirect to.
It can't be that hard.
[1] http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000806.html