Oprah Turns the Page

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Well, publishers and booksellers still have hungry mouths to feed. In the book industry, where profits are narrow, Oprah's endorsement of any title meant a minimum of 500,000 additional sales, says Jim Milliot, the business editor at Publishers Weekly. For the publisher, that translates to at least an additional $5 million in revenue. Among ambitious writers she produced an Oprah effect. They knew that editors were always happy to be offered stories they knew Oprah liked, the ones centered on family drama or personal struggle by characters who are scarred but who endure. Oprah, with her largely female audience, preferred books with a woman at the center of the emotional storm.

If she is mostly giving up the book club now, maybe it's just part of her larger slow-motion retirement. Last month Oprah's company Harpo announced she would leave her show after the 2005-06 season. She has played with the idea of quitting before, but wrapping up her book club may be her way of saying, Look, I can quit while I'm ahead. The cities of Chicago and New York launched book projects that attempted, as she did, to mobilize whole populations to read the same novel during the same month. Whole populations shrugged. What mere government has Oprah's stately power? Then, again, maybe Franzen was right. Oprah was only a visitor to the world of books. It's the writers who are there for the long haul.

--Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York