"Oprah's Book Club 2.0," a joint project of Winfrey's OWN network and her O magazine, begins Monday with the popular memoir "Wild," Cheryl Strayed's story of her 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail in California and Washington. Besides the traditional paper version, featuring the circular Oprah book club logo, special e-editions will be made available that include Winfrey's comments and a reader's guide.
It'll be interesting to see if Oprah still has the same push without her TV show. The publishing industry could use a few Oprah's Book Club-level blockbusters right now.
2. In an effort to remove all traces of Amazon from their books, a Barnes & Noble e-bookseller changed the text of War and Peace:
It appears to be a case of Ctrl-F gone wrong. An astute reader named Philip broke the story on his blog, noting that his reading of the classic was interrupted by the sentence "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern…" The blogger noticed more and more uses of the word "Nookd," leading him to examine a paper copy to find a more accurate translation that used the word "kindled" instead.
This was obviously a dumb accident, but it's become a big story over the weekend. I think it's caught the popular imagination because it triggers that small sense of ookiness many of us have about e-books somewhere in the back of our heads: Their transitory nature means that the text can be changed easily and recklessly. If this happened in a print book, an entire run would be pulped, and so the book would be more thoroughly checked before publication. But because it's an e-book that can be modified in e-readers worldwide with the push of a button, it's treated with much less care.
