A Week For the Books

The good news: Consumers are willing to pay for some content. The less-good news: They're paying for it in the form of books, the oldest of old media currently available. (There are currently no figures available for scroll or stone-tablet sales.)

According to many reports, The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's latest Da Vinci Code installment, has sold one million copies in its first day. "We are seeing historic, recordbreaking sales across all types of our accounts in North America," Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group editor in chief Sonny Mehta said in an article from Reuters.

Without releasing numbers, there have been anecdotal reports of brisk sales for Teddy Kennedy's posthumous memoir, True Compass, as well. Publishers Weekly called sales of Kennedy's book "solid on the day it was released, especially in New England, where sales [were] running neck and neck with Brown."

These tent-pole books couldn't have come sooner for the publishing industry, which has had a very bad year with layoffs and restructuring at all levels.

Next up: Oprah Winfrey will announce her next Book Club selection. Winfrey has already teased that her new selection is unlike anything she's ever picked before, leading book sites like Mediabistro's GalleyCat to make their own predictions, fingering journalist James Collins' Beginner's Greek based on the knowledge that the next Book Club selection comes from Little, Brown. (What a good week for Hachette Book Group, the parent company of both Little, Brown and Twelve, publisher of True Compass.)

Two things are for sure: Whatever Winfrey picks will be a bestseller, and the author of that book might want to tell his or her accountant about some extra income coming in very soon.