Letters to an author used to mean private "fan mail," one on one. On the Net today, this ancient genre of interactivity has been supplanted by the collective communication of hypermail. Readers no longer only respond to a book, they participate in it, indeed, become tourists in the books they read and the sites they visit online.

You the reader become a character in the book, whether Piefke Tourist or Tyrolean Gastgeber. The landscape is the uncharted terrain of cyberspace. You decide: Will we desecrate the site with Massentourismus, or make it our home, and plant geraniums in the window?