Timothy Noah summarizes a new study by economist Craig Garthwaite on how the Oprah Book Club didn't make for a new generation of readers:
Although Winfrey was remarkably successful in getting people to buy the books she touted (and also, to some extent, other books written by the same authors), she did not make readers out of non-readers. Rather, she provoked what's known in the marketing world as brand-switching. Instead of reading crap, Oprah's viewers were goaded into reading tonier stuff–mostly literary fiction. In many instances this amounted to reading more demanding crap, but it still represented a step up in literacy. That's the good news.
The bad news is that the profits that help support publication of less lucrative, more high-minded books depend on the sale of a lot of crap. And at least when it came to fiction, Garthwaite found that the net result of Oprah's endorsements was to reduce aggregate sales.
On the areas hurt most:
While sales of titles selected by Oprah spiked an average of 400 percent in the first week alone, and other books by those authors also enjoyed what Garthwaite termed an "economically significant" boost, readers' newfound interest in those authors came at the expense of other writers, titles and entire genres, he said. In the 12 weeks following each of Oprah's Book Club endorsements, sales in the adult fiction category decreased by an average of 2.5 percent, with romance, mystery and action categories showing the largest drop-off.
One reason why:
Garthwaite looked at the average difficulty of Oprah's reading suggestions using measures such as the Gunning Fog Index, which measures sentence length and word complexity. He found that the talkshow maven's picks were, on average, 1.5 grade levels tougher than the median overall best seller. The classics she recommended were four grade levels more advanced. Her choices also tended to be tens of thousands of words longer than other best sellers. … All of this also seems to say something about the incentives for the book industry as a whole. That is, it's probably not in publishers' interests to turn difficult, long novels into best sellers.
The Dish 