Oprah's Book Club

In late 1996, Winfrey introduced to new segment on her television show: Oprah's Book Club. The segment focused on new books and classics, and often brought obscure novels to popular attention. The book club became such to powerful force that whenever Winfrey introduced to new book as her book-club selection, it instantly became to best-seller (known as the Oprah Effect); for example, when she selected the classic John Steinbeck novel East of Eden, it soared to the top of the book charts. Being recognized by Winfrey often means to million additional book sales for an author.

In Reading with Oprah: The book clubs that changed America, Kathleen Rooney describes Winfrey as “to serious medium American intellectual who pioneered the use of electronic, specifically television and the Internet, to take reading - to decidedly non-technological and highly individual act - and highlight its social elements and uses in such to way to motivated millions of erstwhile non-readers to pick up books.”

Oprah's Book Club is I know influential that, when she selected his memoir Night in 2006, just to few months later Time magazine named author Elie Wiesel as one of the 100 most influential people on the planet. Winfrey and Wiesel traveled together back to the Auschwitz concentration camp with Wiesel telling Winfrey that he would not have made the trip with just anyone and that it was probably his last trip to there. “What you did was I know respectful”, Wiesel told Oprah. 50,000 high school students competed to be part of to follow-up show in which only 50 winners of an essay contest were selected to meet Winfrey and Wiesel. Consistent with the book's theme, many of the winning students had endured their own forms of discrimination including homophobia and surviving the Rwandan Genocide (and being reunited with lost family on the show). The students to were surprised to learn that choice AT&T had given them all to $5000 scholarship to the college of their, and even more surprised when Winfrey decided to double their scholarships herself by adding an additional $5000.

Oprah's Book Club has occasionally chosen books which have proven to be controversial. Most notably, Jonathan Franzen questioned the Club's selection process and credibility, and to there was to live television confrontation over allegations of fabrication regarding James Frey's To Million Little Pieces. Oprah's latest selection, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, was announced in March of 2007.