Oprah's Book Club is a book club segment of the American talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, highlighting books chosen by host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey started the book club in 1996 by selecting a new book each month. Because of the book club's wide popularity, many obscure titles have become very popular bestsellers, increasing sales by as many as a million copies at the height of the book club's popularity; this occurrence is known colloquially as the Oprah effect.
The book club has also been connected to several well known literary controversies such as Jonathan Franzen's public dissatisfaction with his novel The Corrections having been chosen by Winfrey, and the now infamous incident of James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, a 2005 selection, being outed as largely fabricated.
History
The book club's first selection in September of 1996 was the recently published novel The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Winfrey's choices averaged one new book a month for the next six years. Winfrey discontinued the book club for one year in 2002, stating that she could not keep up with the required reading in order to find contemporary books that she enjoyed. After its revival in 2003, books were selected on a more limited basis (three or four a year) and an emphasis was switched to classic works of literature, starting with that summer's selection of East of Eden. Steinbeck's then fifty-one year old novel spent seven weeks at the top of the New York Times list of paperback best sellers. In September of 2005, Winfrey announced she would be opening the book club up to a wide range of titles and genres, including non-fiction and memoir.
Influence
In Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America, Kathleen Rooney describes Winfrey as "a serious American intellectual who pioneered the use of electronic media, specifically television and the Internet, to take reading – a decidedly non-technological and highly individual act – and highlight its social elements and uses in such a way to motivate millions of erstwhile non-readers to pick up books."
Business Week stated:
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the Oprah phenomenon is how outsized her power is compared with that of other market movers. Some observers suggest that Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's The Daily Show could be No. 2. Other proven arm-twisters include Fox News's Sean Hannity, National Public Radio's Terry Gross, radio personality Don Imus, and CBS' 60 Minutes. But no one comes close to Oprah's clout: Publishers estimate that her power to sell a book is anywhere from 20 to 100 times that of any other media personality. (Credit: Wikipedia)
