I'm Melissa Harris Perry and you're with a year.

Americans buy more than 800 million books a year.

And even though the pandemic error bump in book sales has stabilized, publishing remains a multi-billion-dollar industry.

And with all those dollars to be made, publishing houses work pretty hard to get titles into the hands of readers.

Today, that means harnessing the power of social media, specifically influencers.

Take Penguin Random House.

With more than 4.5 billion in annual sales and more than 15% of the global market, Random House is

a publishing juggernaut. And if you head on over to their website, you'll find this invitation.

You'll pick a handful of titles from the monthly email that you're interested in to potentially

feature on your account. You are under no obligation to post and we'll mail them to you.

It's that easy. It's not like influential book recommendations are a new phenomenon. I mean,

remember back in 1996 when Oprah Winfrey single-handedly transformed the book world with the launch of

Oprah's book club? And what we want to do is start a book club here on the Oprah show, because I know a lot of you are in reading clubs out there and you have a book of the month and so forth.

And I want to get the whole country reading again.

The Oprah Effect didn't just sell books. It altered America's relationship with reading. And nearly

30 years later, social media book influencers may not have the single-handed power of Oprah. But this

generation of reading recommenders is bringing a whole new vibe to sharing the love of reading.

Okay, I finally finished reading the first book in the Shatami series, and I have

oh so very much to say.

So there's a trans rights read-a-thon taking place on Book Talk this week, and I wanted to show you the book that I'm going to be reading.

This is Nevada by Imogen Binney.

These are some books that I will accept no criticism on. I just don't want to hear it.

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