Oprahs Book Club 2.0 goes digital

When Oprah Winfrey, then the brightest star on daytime TV, began her book club in 1996, inexpensive e-books and e-readers seemed more futurist rumour than everyday reality. Social media could have meant friendly reporters.

Now, as Winfrey, co-owner of a struggling cable network, launches Oprahs Book Club 2.0, shes seeking a literary home on a digital landscape. Comparing todays fragmented do-it-yourself media with the world of 1996 is like comparing Winfreys 42-acre estate near Santa Barbara, Calif., with her birthplace amid the rural poverty of Kosciusko, Miss.

Publishers and booksellers cheer her clubs revival, despite questions whether the new Winfrey, with a much smaller TV audience, carries the influence of the old Winfrey, who turned 70 books into bestsellers.

On Sunday, Winfreys interview with memoirist Cheryl Strayed, the first author chosen for the new book club, airs on OWNs Super Soul Sunday (11 a.m. ET/PT) and simultaneously streams on Oprah Radio and on OWNS Facebook page. (OWN is short for Oprah Winfrey Network.)

Ratings show that the audience for Winfreys weekly show Super Soul averaged only 114,000 viewers in the past month a sliver of her more than five million to six million viewers when her daily syndicated show ended its 25-year run last year. At its peak, The Oprah Winfrey Show averaged 12 million viewers.

What hasnt changed is how Winfrey, Americas favourite reader, reacts when she loves a book.

This spring, she read Strayeds inspirational memoir, Wild, about the authors solo 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail after the death of her mother, the destruction of her marriage and experimentation with heroin.

Winfrey, who says she read Wild in part in hardcover and on her Kindle and iPad, writes in the July issue of O, the Oprah Magazine: I love this book. I want to shout it from the mountaintop. I want to shout it from the Web I knew I had to reinvent my book club.

On June 1, Winfrey announced an interac! tive and multi-platform book club that uses Twitter, Facebook, Storify and GroupMe. Readers can post questions that Winfrey and Strayed answer in videos. Print editions of Wild carry a new version of the familiar O book club logo. The special e-book includes Winfreys notes on her favourite passages.

Sales of Wild, which was well-reviewed upon its March release, spiked. Within two weeks of Winfreys announcement, Wild went from No. 165 on USA TODAYs Best-Selling Books list to No. 14. Its now No. 35.

Publisher Knopf reports that sales of Wild have jumped from 85,000 before Winfreys announcement to 270,000 (150,000 print books, 120,000 e-books). Knopf printed 280,000 copies of the book.

In the clubs heyday, before e-books took off, publishers would print more than 500,000 extra copies of any book Winfrey selected. Twenty including her first, The Deep End of the Ocean, Jacquelyn Mitchards novel about the kidnapping of a child, and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoys tragic 19th-century love story, in 2004 hit No. 1 on USA TODAYs list. Forty-one of her other selections landed in the lists top 10.

Barnes & Nobles marketing chief Patricia Bostelman said comparisons are difficult because of all the changes in the marketplace, but she said Wild is selling better than Winfreys final selections from her old book club in 2010: two Charles Dickens novels, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities.

Bostelman said no one drives large numbers of readers to reasonable, serious books like Winfrey does.

Sara Nelson, books editor of O magazine before joining Amazon as editorial director of the online retailer in May, said Amazons sales of Wild quadrupled in June. At O magazine, she remembers Winfrey couldnt stop talking about the book. Thats what really drives her.

Strayed, 43, who literally fell to the floor in shock when Winfrey called her in April, said, Every author asks How will my book find its au! dience? but Oprah has such a grand effect.

Winfrey declined all interview requests about her new book club and hasnt said how often shell pick new titles. Winfrey did talk to USA TODAY last year as her talk show ended, saying she wanted to do a show for books and authors on cable.

Instead of a regularly scheduled book show, she has taken her book club digital, which appeals to Kathleen Rooney, author of Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (2005). Rooney said Winfrey is embracing print and e-books and mixing digital platforms with face-to-face contact among people in the real world. (One of the clubs new features helps readers form their own small book clubs and locate other participants.)

Rooney, who teaches English at DePaul University in Chicago, said thats in keeping with the theory of convergence, that new media do not overthrow and replace old ones, but operate in tandem with them.

If so, the success of Oprahs new book club may not be measured merely by her TV audience or impact on bestseller lists.

Her new club may be smaller, but its going to be a community that she will capture a larger share of the attention of, and that shes going to know a lot more about, Rooney said. Thats valuable to advertisers. Its the social media model: You dont have to get everyone to watch you, provided you know extremely well who does watch you and what their habits are.

In 1996, Winfreys idea was to call it a book club and then maybe some actual book clubs in the actual world would read the books along with her which they did, Rooney said. But instead of really being one big book club, it was a nexus of individual readers and book clubs that wanted to sail in Oprahs armada. Now it stands to be more like an actual book club.

Jackie Blem, blog co-ordinator at Denvers Tattered Cover bookstores, said: Facebook and its like have conditioned us to regard digital conversations as the social norm, so a digital book club fits right in. OBC 2.0 feels more involving! there are interactive ways to participate in real time and fantastic extras that can enhance the read.

Winfreys old book club had an active website. In 2008, she led 10 weeks of web seminars with Ekhart Tolle, author of the self-help book A New Earth, No. 1 on USA TODAYs list for 11 consecutive weeks.

But the added digital emphasis prompts Blem to ask whether the new club will attract a mostly e-reader crowd. Data collected for USA TODAYs list show the digital version of Wild outsold the hardcover only the first week after Winfreys announcement. Paul Bogaards of publisher Knopf attributes that to the availability of the print books. Oprah opens channels of distribution places like Target or Walmart come on board when she does.

Blum said that like many things related to e-books, booksellers are watching with great interest and slightly bated breath. But, in the long run, a recommendation from Oprah is a good thing and booksellers know how to run with it.

Carol Fitzgerald, founder of The Book Report Network, a group of websites about books, agrees that Winfreys concept is interesting, but says the clubs early online engagement is disappointing for a personality of Oprahs stature. As of Wednesday, the book clubs Facebook page had 2,151 likes. Its Twitter account had 138,040 followers compared with Winfreys 12 million followers.

Creating an online community is very different from working in traditional media, Fitzgerald said. Its not as easy as saying If I build it, they will come. A lot is built organically.

A study, released in April, challenges the conventional wisdom that Winfreys old book club boosted all of publishing.

Craig Garthwaite, a Northwestern University economist, studied book sales data from 2001 to 2011 and found overall sales declined slightly whenever Winfrey chose a title. Readers, he concluded, spent more time on Winfreys challenging selections, such as Toni Morrison novels, rather than with traditional beach book fare. In other wo! rds, the quality of the books went up, but the number sold went down.

Im not saying she didnt do a good thing, Garthwaite said, but the data indicate she didnt convert a lot of non-readers into readers. She said she wanted to get America reading. Thats a very difficult thing to do, even for someone as influential as Oprah.

After reading Garthwaites study, Matthew Norcross of McLean & Eakin Booksellers in Petoskey, Mich., questioned his own assumption that Winfrey gave the book world a huge lift.

What really may have been happening is that instead of grabbing the trashy novel, customers were buying the quality paperback of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he said. (After Winfrey chose One Hundred Years of Solitude in 2004, it hit No. 6 on USA TODAYs list.)

Norcross added, I admire anyone who is able to raise the cultural bar, especially in our reality-TV-obsessed world. But he says that not only has Winfrey lost some of her impact, but perhaps it was always overblown.

He has no doubt she can make a title move up the bestseller list, and that has incredible value, but I dont know how much longer shell have that ability given her smaller television audience.

Still, hes hearing customers once again asking about the new Oprah book. Norcross suggested the clubs success is important to Winfrey because it is part of her image. If she isnt seen as the countrys best bookseller, then it is just one more jewel in her crown that isnt sparkling like it used to.

USA Today