The brief says sophistication, modern, clean & concise so we wanted to avoid any kind of clutter. We chose a classic typeface often used for book text. We kept the colors a very modern blue palette. We used simple typographic elements like the exclamation mark to enhance the dot in the dot com and also to enhance the slogan which is set in a more modern typeface. We wanted to avoid doing a cute worm figure because the audience/market is very diverse in age. we didn't want it to feel too childish. so in this design we used an elegant tilda mark to make, as you suggested, a subtle suggestion of a worm.
In this design we suggested a worm by simply raising the baseline of one of the o's and lowering the baseline of another. it's simple suggestions like this that intrigue people. much like the way Google inserts additional o's into it's logo on search result pages. again the type is sophisticated, clean and modern as requested in the brief.
Although this design does not contain the worm reference, we felt it was worth sharing. We set the logo/wordmark in various typefaces that are commonly used in book design. The different typefaces can represent different books (as a bookworm reads an abundance of books) but can also represent different readers. The slgun is set in a speech bubble which can be seen as a call to action coming from the bookworms.