Perhaps I should have said the published author would work as a screen instead of an editor, to at least cull the bulk of the crapola.
I used to enjoy the ‘writings from the slush pile’ that was published in the old National Lampoon magazine. Though he did it anonymously, I recognized the collection as coming from Ben Bova, when he was editing Analog.
Yes, crowdsourcing the slush pile could work (my understanding is most books can be rejected based on their first page). That said, I’m not sure it would do anything to actually help B&N. Amazon has various ways of trying to milk the “want to be author” crowd for their own benefit, like Amazon’s Kindle Digital program. Getting your book on the store shelf is great and would be an attractor over using Amazon. But I’m not really sure there’s that many really great books that aren’t getting attention from publishers. Publishing a book has a lot of costs (the paper and ink are among the least of them) and B&N doesn’t really have any of the infrastructure in place to do so.