Curating for local reading interests

I have been thinking a lot about the great talk that Andrew Steeves gave last week, even going so far as to discuss it with colleagues not enrolled in our class. One of the things Andrew talked about that I had not considered was the relationship of the curated local bookstore to the community in which it resides. The really cool relationship he described is certainly something I had experienced living in Guelph, Ontario and occasionally buying books at The Bookshelf. The staff there could take my interests and funnel them into great reads that were often off the beaten path. Of course I understand now that they were practicing the much studied art of readers advisory. I liked the way Andrew was able to put this relationship in a very Ranganathanesque way, "every reader his or her book."
With the decline of the local bookstore as a business, where does this curated selection reside? I took this question to a colleague who felt that bloggers, librarians, and other apostles of culture could fill the shoes of these bookstore owners. In some ways I agree. With the rise of Print On Demand (POD) services and our access to word processors, I really think that libraries should get into the self publishing business for local authors. Communities are bursting with local interest stories of cultural and historical importance that no publisher would ever touch. Will the books circulate? I can't say, but remember what Andrew was arguing. He relished the notion that a bookstore might wait six months for a book of poetry to find just the right owner.
This is a call to librarians and other cultural and heritage professionals to become deeply involved members of their communities. We need to ensure that as local bookstores lose out to Amazon.com that the curation of important work is not lost, and that our libraries are not just dustier versions of Chapters.