No Oprah book club?

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey to end her show.

It has just been announced. The iconic talk show will end in 2011, at the finish of the 25th season -- which means the end of the iconic Oprah's Book Club, too.

At times her choices were considered bizarre, but she created buzzworthy books, which delighted many a publisher, and made (or broke) many authors. It will be sadly missed.

And the writer whose book is featured in that very last show will gain unusual fame. Obviously, it is a slot to be greatly coveted.

More details will be given on Friday's broadcast of The Oprah Winfrey Show, guaranteeing it a bigger audience than ever.

Oprah Winfrey, 55, started her career in Nashville Tennessee, and Baltimore, Maryland, before moving to Chicago in 1984, to host a morning talk show called "A.M. Chicago," which became so popular that the following year it was renamed "The Oprah Winfrey Show." The year after that, it went into syndication, to become the most successful talk show ever, reaching about 7,000,000 viewers every day.

Oprah is leaving to concentrate on her own cable channel, OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network.

Bestselling Call Girl Lowers the Veil

"Belle de Jour" drops her anonymity

Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a former call girl who published her memoirs as Secret Diary of a Call Girl, has revealed her true identity.

A brave move, as the book, published last year (and don't you love the jacket!), has become a bestseller, hot on the heels of being turned into a TV series starring Dr. Who's lost love, Billie Piper. However, the writer says that keeping her identity a deadly secret was making her paranoid. (Anything for a decent night's sleep.)

Dr. Magnanti wrote under the penname "Belle de Jour" to describe her adventures as a high-class escort, charging 300 pounds per night to finance her doctoral studies. As she confessed to the Sunday Times, it was a lot more enjoyable (albeit more dangerous) than her other job as a computer programmer.

By day, she is now employed The Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health, as a highly rated expert in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology.

And at night she writes a highly rated blog, and produces racy books.

Andy Warhol's Little Red Hen for Sale

Children's book illustrations by Andy Warhol are to be auctioned in New York next month.

The artist, who became famous for his pop art creations, including multi-colored screen prints of well-known people (think Marilyn Monroe), was a book illustrator early in his career.

One of those books was the cautionary tale of the Little Red Hen, who toiled while the lazy cat, dog, and mouse shirked, and four drawings from this are to go under the hammer.

At a recent sale of contemporary art, a Warhol print of a set of one-dollar bills went for $43,800,000.00.

The Little Red Hen drawings are expected to fetch $600.

Warhol is also known for coining the phrase "famous for 15 minutes."

BLUE MONDAY

Occasionally research turns up the most wonderful tidbits of information. Unfortunately, those tidbits are usually irrelevant to the actual topic, but they make the world a really, really fascinating place for a few special moments.

This happened when I started wondering about Parkinson's paints. Parkinson, of course, was Sydney Parkinson, the natural history artist who was employed by Joseph Banks, and voyaged on the Endeavour with Captain Cook and Tupaia. In Tahiti, or so Banks related in his journal, Parkinson was forced to sit under a mosquito net while painting in the open. Because of the fascinated crowd? So he could share his craft with Tupaia (who took up art himself) in semi-private?

Nope.

It was because of the flies. Wrote Banks, "they eat the painters colours off the paper as fast as they can be laid on." Well, it was not a surprise that there were so many flies, as every nobly born Tahitian carried his personal fly-whisk. But I did start to wonder what the flies ate. They surely were not interested in the water dilutant of the water colors, Tahiti not being the desert, so it must have been the pigment.

Accordingly, I searched the web for anything about pigments and found a lively web exhibit, Pigments through the Ages. The pigments are inorganic, mostly, or so I found. Red, for instance, was mercuric sulphide, while the browns, oranges, and yellows are based on ochres. Surely the flies did not eat that! But then I found that blue came from indigo, or woad leaves, which had been fermented with . . . wait for it . . . human urine.

But there was another, even more fascinating, wrinkle. That urine had to be highly alcoholic, so the dyers prepared for the job by getting thoroughly drunk. The actual dyeing process happened on Sundays. The pieces of cloth were dunked in the tubs of alcoholic urine and left overnight, and on Mondays the hungover dyers hung them up in the air, and the cloth gradually turned bright blue.

Hence the term "Blue Monday."

Canada's Giller Prize won by priest abuse novel

Linden MacIntyre, an investigative journalist who works for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, is the author of a novel about sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, which has won the Giller Prize.

The book, called The Bishop's Man, is dedicated to "priests and nuns struggling to do their jobs." MacIntyre believes that those jobs are made much harder because of a "failure of leadership" in the Church.

His novel tells the story of a priest who is given the task of stamping out sex abuse scandals before they hit the press. The jury said it was a "brave" novel (which sounds an understatement), "written with impressive delicacy and understanding."

The Giller Prize honors the best in Canadian fiction writing, and is worth $47,000 Canadian.

Kindle for your PC

More digital news -- Amazon has launched their Kindle for PC application, and promises a Mac version coming soon.

It ties in to the launch of Windows 7 and is designed to use certain capabilities in the new software, though it also works with Windows XP and Vista. Given the size of that platform, the new application could do far more than the international Kindle to make Kindle files available throughout the world.

Separately, Wired observes: "But the thing that intrigues us is the screenshot above (along with more on the Amazon site) which shows a book with color illustrations. This may mean a color Kindle is on its way, or that Amazon is simply future-proofing its Kindle books. Either way, since when did Kindle books start to get color pictures? It would seem rather bandwidth-unfriendly to a company that restricts international downloads to save on the wireless bills."Amazon release

Romance goes digital

Is this a chance to express your romantic voice?

Harlequin has announced the launch of Carina Press, a digital-only publishing house that will sell directly to consumers and "operate independently of their traditional publishing businesses."

Angela James is joining the new operation as executive editor. Their call for submissions include both new works as well as "books that have been previously released in print form, but for which the author has either retained digital rights or had digital rights revert to them."

With an expected summer 2010 launch, Carina plans to issue new titles weekly. Harlequin ceo Donna Hayes says, "We expect to discover new authors and unique voices that may not be able to find homes in traditional publishing houses. It definitely gives us greater flexibility in the type of editorial we can accept from authors and offer to readers. As well, we hope to reach a new group of readers with niche editorial."Release