As book authors (our ninth book, Extreme Trust, will be out from Penguin in April), we are of course very interested in seeing the publishing industry succeed. That's why we have a modest proposal for B&N: Join the modern world. Sure, you've copied Kindle with the Nook, and you create great experiences in the stores, and Lynch claims B&N to be a "technology" company. But you're still losing money. There's not enough space here to address all the issues facing brick-and-mortar stores threatened by online retailers, but we'd like to point to one problem that would be easy to fix: Make it possible for -- indeed, encourage -- your own employees and customers to tell everybody how great Barnes & Noble is. This is the Age of Transparency, yet only words from the home office can be used when speaking publicly about the company. That's not "controlling the brand image." It's strangulation.

Having heard about how terrific the events and service are at one Manhattan Barnes & Noble store, an associate at our 1to1 Media division called B&N's corporate PR to request a brief interview on camera with a store manager as part of our Social Media Week. Our outreach and subsequent follow up were ignored. The goal was to ask two questions: "What makes customer experiences at this Barnes & Noble store so special?" And "How do you keep those special feelings going?" Hopeful to still get an interview as part of our Social Media Week video series, 1to1 Media Editorial Director Ginger Conlon and I visited the store. Employees referred us to "a manager," a woman on the first floor. She politely explained that she was not allowed to speak to us, and that any answer to our questions would have to come from company headquarters. We were told that such comments might be ready sometime the following week. This is common in corporate America, but that doesn't make it smart anymore.

Here's what occurs to us: The store manager is entrusted with managing the operations and business of several busy floors of a Manhattan retailer. This includes overseeing all deliveries and displays of all the products, making sure things work for customers, meeting minimum regulations for food service, coordinating special events and experiences, all the customer service, the security, and the money. The manager is responsible for dozens of on-duty employees and doubtless many more not at the store at the moment. And yet, this same person is not empowered to tell reporters what makes Barnes & Noble special. And neither is anyone else who works there.

Pssst: Half of the customers in that store have blogs of their own. Everybody is the media now. And here's a thought: While B&N is carefully controlling what's said about the company, a la the 1980s tradition of "public relations," anybody in the world can say anything, anytime, about any aspect of Amazon.com -- on Amazon's website. It's not yet inevitable that traditional bookselling will yield to online and e-book sales. But it is inevitable that democratization of opinions will trump tight control by PR departments in the home offices of large companies. We assume that Barnes & Noble is doing everything it can to build genuine loyalty among employees and customers alike. If that's the case, then the easier a company makes it to generate buzz, and the more it trusts its own employees and customers to do so, the better chance it has of improving the market cap that Ms. Bosman mentioned.