Oprah

Tuesday night, when Jon Stewart announced that he would be stepping down from "The Daily Show," millennials across the country were shocked and saddened.

But book publicists were crushed.

In an increasingly fractured market, "The Daily Show" has been a singular platform for authors to promote their books.

New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul called it last night on Twitter:

It's going to be tough for Mark Zuckerberg to break his New Year's resolution this year. He's got more than 130,000 people to keep him accountable.

Over the weekend, the young Facebook founder announced that this year he would read a new book every other week. Zuckerberg, whose audacious resolution last year was to learn Mandarin, settled on this new goal after soliciting suggestions from his millions of Facebook followers. On his Facebook page, Zuckerberg created a Facebook group and urged his followers to join his pseudo-book club, which had amassed 137,486 Likes

Jonathan Franzen is not dead. It’s sad news for the world of English letters, I know, but he is still alive, writing (presumably), and talking (when his foot is not wedged firmly in his tonsils). Sad news for Oprah too. And for XX-chromosome-bearers who have the temerity to decipher words. But Jonathan Franzen is, in […]

The post Grumpy Cat to get biography? No, it’s Jonathan Franzen! appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Reading the original Oprah Book Club list is like throwing yourself into a dizzying cultural time machine. From Charles Dickens to Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Toni Morrison, her Book Club picks from the platform of her storied ABC television talk show imprinted a new generation of readers with classics, both new and old.

When her talk show went away, her Book Club did too after a long 15-year run that spread "The Oprah Effect" across the lucky publishers of roughly 70 books.

Numbers show that the publishing industry is handling the rise of e-readers better than what folk knowledge might suggest.

The fall publishing season is in full swing. There can hardly have been a year with more luminaries atop both the fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists; J. K. Rowling, Michael Chabon, Ken Follett, Junot Diaz, among others, represent literary acclaim and commercial appeal. Diaz is having an especially good run. Stephen Colbert, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Young, Bob Woodward, and Salman Rushdie are just a sampling of the nonfiction bestsellers.

Earlier this summer, Penguin Group, long a distinguished major publisher of books, paid $116 million to acquire Author Solutions Inc. A leading provider of self-publishing services, Author Solutions said that since it was formed in 2007, "it has enabled 150,000 authors to publish, market and distribute more than 190,000 books in print and electronic formats." The transaction is a significant breakthrough in what has become a vital factor in the publishing landscape of the digital age.