I am not interested, per se, in social recommendations; I just find encouraging e-commerce technologies and innovations start to transfer to high street and specialised retailers. It is a sign that e-commerce user experience is maturing and desirable. It also suggests that HMV, Virgin, Strand, etc. could use their e-commerce websites as an experimenting space – design, implement, iterate, repeat until acceptable, to improve their high street retail experience. As Gennaro Castaldo (HMV) put it in a BusinessWeek article, “You have to give people an added reason to come into your store, something that makes the act of visiting a shop as rewarding as acquiring the good itself.” The crazy thing here is that Strand does not even offer customers reviews/recommendations on their website for Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.

PS: If you have other examples, feel free to post them.

PS: You can also bet on the next idea… tagging? Customers who bought that book also got…?

I recommend you read Jan Chipchase detailed blog post about this and the follow up studies in Korea, China, Japan, etc.