The Big Bad Book Blog

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. continue reading

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. continue reading