.

From Publishers Lunch February 29^th, 2008:

“Following Oprah’s enthusiastic endorsement Eckhart Tolle’s A NEW EARTH has added another 3.45 million copies in print, “the record for the most copies ever shipped by Penguin Group USA in a four-week period.” That’s on top of an initial shipment of 776,000 copies in advance of the Oprah announcement. BN buyer Jules Herbert says “for the first four weeks on sale [it] is our bestselling Oprah’s Book Club title.” The publisher says over 500,000 people have registered for the 10-week webinar that begins next Monday night.”

The Oprah machine never ceases to amaze me. She says something is great and all these people blindly follow her. She would make a great cult leader. Or maybe she already is. After all, she is charismatic, has people giving her money (Angel Network), taking her word as truth and more. Lately, I haven’t been able to watch her show because she has these amazing people on and then cuts them off and talks over them and puts words in their mouths or interrupts to talk about herself and her experiences when she initiated the subject—or a related one—which was supposed to be about her guest and what they do. Why does she even bother to have guests on her show? She could just ask herself questions. Plus the vast amounts of product placement and commercials and self promotion turns me off. There is no longer any content outside of Oprah and her products.

While I commend Oprah for encouraging North America to become more literate and is helping authors out by placing her little book club sticker on their books and instantly launching books onto bestseller lists, I also feel uncomfortable. Mostly because she has this great pulling power. Her current pick is about changing your life and leading with purpose, which is good. Many people are searching for purpose—myself included—yet there is something about this that doesn’t quite jive. Maybe it is her commercialism. Maybe it is the fact that she is a celebrity who can no longer bear the thought of sharing a bar of soap with another person. In other words, who is she to tell us how to live? She thinks we should all be spanx wearing, purposeful life driven consumers. If we are busy trying to emulate her and be all purposeful and enlightened yet trying to buy, buy, buy, what is going to happen? I think we are going to actually push ourselves further away from who we are truly supposed to be.

At the end of the Oprah day, we are going to be less the vision that she is trying to lure us towards, because in the end, Oprah just wants us to consume what she’s peddling.

Tags: books, celebrities //