When Oprah Winfrey, then the brightest star on daytime TV, began her book club in 1996, inexpensive e-books and e-readers seemed more futurist rumour than everyday reality. Social media could have meant friendly reporters.

Now, as Winfrey, co-owner of a struggling cable network, launches Oprahs Book Club 2.0, shes seeking a literary home on a digital landscape. Comparing todays fragmented do-it-yourself media with the world of 1996 is like comparing Winfreys 42-acre estate near Santa Barbara, Calif., with her birthplace amid the rural poverty of Kosciusko, Miss.

Publishers and booksellers cheer her clubs revival, despite questions whether the new Winfrey, with a much smaller TV audience, carries the influence of the old Winfrey, who turned 70 books into bestsellers.

On Sunday, Winfreys interview with memoirist Cheryl Strayed, the first author chosen for the new book club, airs on OWNs Super Soul Sunday (11 a.m. ET/PT) and simultaneously streams on Oprah Radio and on OWNS Facebook page. (OWN is short for Oprah Winfrey Network.)

Ratings show that the audience for Winfreys weekly show Super Soul averaged only 114,000 viewers in the past month a sliver of her more than five million to six million viewers when her daily syndicated show ended its 25-year run last year. At its peak, The Oprah Winfrey Show averaged 12 million viewers.

What hasnt changed is how Winfrey, Americas favourite reader, reacts when she loves a book.

This spring, she read Strayeds inspirational memoir, Wild, about the authors solo 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail after the death of her mother, the destruction of her marriage and experimentation with heroin.

Winfrey, who says she read Wild in part in hardcover and on her Kindle and iPad, writes in the July issue of O, the Oprah Magazine: I love this book. I want to shout it from the mountaintop. I want to shout it from the Web I knew I had to reinvent my book club.

On June 1, Winfrey announced an interactive and multi-platform book club that uses Twitter, Facebook, Storify and GroupMe. Readers can post questions that Winfrey and Strayed answer in videos. Print editions of Wild carry a new version of the familiar O book club logo. The special e-book includes Winfreys notes on her favourite passages.

Sales of Wild, which was well-reviewed upon its March release, spiked. Within two weeks of Winfreys announcement, Wild went from No. 165 on USA TODAYs Best-Selling Books list to No. 14. Its now No. 35.

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