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Richard & Judy: The UK's Oprah-Antidote
June 17, 2008
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by Aaron Hierholzer
Oprah has been kind to books, and books have been kind to Oprah. The godlike talk show host granted a windfall to bookselling with her famous club (and performed something of a miracle, prompting legions of soccer moms and their ilk to rush to bookstores and ask for the works of William Faulkner). Now, her upcoming weight-loss book, according to UsMagazine.com, has commanded the highest advance ever, besting even Bill Clinton’s My Life. Whether or not you find Oprah a worthy arbiter of culture, there’s no arguing that she resuscitated reading for many a jaded TV watcher.
But as Oprah’s club rose to prominence in the late nineties, the Brits watched and saw room for improvement. In 2004, husband-and-wife talk show hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan launched a book club of their own—but they didn’t want to directly emulate Oprah.
The club’s founder and book selector, Amanda Ross, accuses Ms. Winfrey of being “sugary” and “sycophantic” to her authors. Ross takes pride in the Richard and Judy Book Club’s authenticity; she’ll readily admit that she regrets putting Monica Ali’s Brick Lane on the list, a book that neither she, Judy, or Richard liked. And the show also runs celebrity reviews of the selected books, some of which have been largely negative and ended up hurting sales. Ross claims to resist any influence from eager publishers as well, and insists that she takes her responsibility very seriously. One gets the sense that she hopes to establish an open discourse about the books on the list—a far cry from the suffocating intimacy between Oprah and her chosen few. (Witness her emotional rage at the “betrayal” of James Frey and the spurning of Jonathan Franzen.)
Ross—widely acknowledged as the most powerful person in the UK book world—chose a summer reading list that was unveiled on the Richard and Judy program yesterday. The list is comprised mainly of writers at the beginning of their careers. So, if you already powered through A New Earth and are now just waiting, thumbs twiddling, for the next edict from on high, why not check out a few of these?
Of course, there are problems with the whole TV-book-club thing (narrowing of the market, consolidation of tastemaking, the development of a populace dependent on someone to tell them what to read, to name a few) but here are a few reasons I prefer the Richard-and-Judy model to Oprah’s:
- There are more books. While it may be more climactic and exciting to unveil only a few books a year, and the reading-list format of Richard and Judy is decidedly scholastic, the books get more room to breathe in greater numbers. Oprah says, You GOTTA read this!!! Dick and Judy say, Well hello. Here are some books we think are worth taking a look at . . .
- The selections are diverse, and usually contemporary. Sure it’s cool to see Steinbeck top the bestseller lists, but, man, he already had his chance! And Ross's choices often allow for elbow-rubbing between the literary and the borderline lowbrow, creating an interesting space for the openminded reader.
- There’s no pressure for readers to like the book. As Ross suggests above, Richard and Judy aren’t beholden to the authors, and there’s not the pressure of a heartfelt sit-down with the author to sway readers' interpretation of the book itself.
Oh, Richard and Judy also have a wine club. This makes discussing the books significantly more pleasant.
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Book Technology: The Best of 2007
January 4, 2008
by Aaron Hierholzer
2007 was fun, wasn't it? Between Judith Regan, O.J. Simpson, Amazon's Kindle, the AMS bankruptcy, and James Frey vs. Oprah redux, there was plenty of shock, titillation, and Schadenfreude to go around. (We're pointedly excluding a certain boy wizard. Months later, we're still fatigued.) But bigger than any one of these stories was the industry's continued march into the brave new world of technology.
And yeah, yeah, years in review are so rampant come January, but 2007 wasn't just any year. It saw the digital world and the book world become slightly less uncomfortable bedfellows. Shelfari, LibraryThing, and GoodReads brought social networking to book lovers, e-books continued their long and arduous journey to popular consumption, and publishing in general proved itself more savvy online. That's not to say the more disturbing trends didn't continue---independent bookstores dropped like flies (although MySpace came to the rescue in a few instances) and the battle to keep book review sections in newspapers raged on as literary bloggers multiplied. Before moving into exciting, uncharted 2008 (ready for 979 ISBN prefixes?), the Big Bad Book Blog presents a brief overview of some of the more interesting developments of 2007.
Winter
- Wowio.com, an ad-supported site that offers free e-books, officially launches when it strikes a deal for one hundred of Oxford University Press's titles.
- The Last Messages, an epistolary novel for the 21st century, is published in Helsinki. It consists entirely of text messages.
- Amazon invests in Shelfari, giving the online bookshelf social site a huge boost.
- HarperCollins and Random House launch competing widgets, allowing readers to browse inside their titles from blogs and other sites. Random House now has over 600,000 widgets on 2,000 sites, according to Publishing Trends.
- Microsoft differentiates Live Book Search, its online book search program, from Google Book Search. What's the difference? We respect copyrights, Microsoft says.
Spring
- Random House starts a book club in the Second Life "metaverse."
- Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, compiles an audiobook from her popular podcast, which she proceeds to sell on iTunes. She also appears on Oprah, so this must've been important.
- Macmillian sees huge viral marketing success for Quirkology. A video clip supporting the book reached 800,000 viewers, according to Publishing News.
- The Espresso Book Machine, which prints books on-demand in a matter of minutes, is unveiled and later installed in the New York Public Library.
Summer
- Roberto Bernocco releases Compagni di Viaggo, a 384-page novel the Italian author wrote on his cell phone.
- First annual O'Reilly Tools of Change conference is held in San Jose, California.
- Simon & Schuster launch bookvideos.tv, which features interviews of over 40 authors.
- Richard Charkin, head of Macmillan in the UK, steals laptops from Google’s BEA booth, saying he’s just playing the same “trick” on them they play on authors with copyrighted work.
- Microsoft adds copyrighted material to its Live Book Search; Google offers co-branded book search to member publishers of Google Book Search.
- Penguin joins the e4book initiative, announcing plans to ask all business partners transact business completely electronically in 2008.
Fall
- Pioneering a new university publishing model, Rice University releases Images of Memorable Cases, one of the first titles in its return to publishing after a ten-year hiatus. The book is formatted digitally by Connexions, and available in a hard copy from print-on-demand company QOOP.
- Amazon finally releases the much buzzed-about Kindle, hoping to jump start the e-book market. EV-DO capable and reportedly quite functional, the device sells out in a matter of hours, although it received mixed reviews from some sources---primarily for its hefty $399 price tag. Many find it "ugly."
- Conrad Black's myriad fans are delighted when he begins using the Margaret Atwood's LongPen, a device that allows him to sign books remotely by way of a touchpad connected to an "autopen" in the store. Black was unable to promote his Nixon biography as he was confined to his Chicago home before being sentenced to six and a half years in prison for fraud and obstruction of justice.
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