‘Oprah’s Book Club’ Coming to Apple TV+ and Apple Books

There’s another show that will be debuting on Apple TV+ when it launches on November 1st — the first fruits of Apple’s multi-year TV partnership with Oprah.

Apple announced today that Oprah’s Book Club will be coming exclusively to Apple’s media platform, creating a unique bridge between Apple Books and Apple TV+.

As part of her partnership with Apple, Oprah Winfrey, the legendary producer, actress, talk show host, and philanthropist, will be building a global book club anchored on Apple’s Books platform, where readers will be able to find and pre-order Oprah-recommended titles through a new section of the Books app that will be dedicated to providing an “immersive experience” for users to discover these top-recommended titles.

Meanwhile, Winfrey will also be hosting a new exclusive Apple TV+ show, Oprah’s Book Club, where she will interview authors of her selections at various locations around the world. While this will be a regular series, it appears that right now that new episodes will only be released every two months, in tandem with Oprah’s book selections.

The First Book

The first recommendation for the new book club is The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The book can be pre-ordered now on Apple Books in both ebook and audiobook formats, and will be released tomorrow.

I am who I am today because of the experience of learning to read at an early age. Reading opened up a whole world for me beyond the red dirt road and my grandmother’s porch in Mississippi. I want to do that for everybody.

Oprah Winfrey

Winfrey will be interviewing Coates for the debut episode of her Apple TV+ series, which is expected to premiere when Apple’s streaming service launches on November 1st. Oprah’s conversation with Coates will be filmed in front of a live audience at Apple’s Carnegie Library store in Washington, D.C. next month.

Promoting Literacy

In addition to being a coup for Apple’s media platforms, the new initiative is also intended to help “create lifelong readers at an early age,” both through the club itself as well as funding local libraries and literacy programs by way of contributions that Apple will make to the American Library Association for every Oprah’s Book Club selection sold.

Few people in the world can bring us together like Oprah, whose compassion and grace celebrating the power of books are unmatched. It’s our honor to provide a new platform for Oprah’s Book Club and support the American Library Association in opening hearts and minds to the joy of reading.

Apple CEO Tim Cook

As part of this initiative, Apple is also highlighting the new “Reading Goals” feature in the iOS 13 Books app, which it hopes will help users make a daily habit of reading.

More Coming from Oprah

Creating the world’s largest book club is just the beginning for Oprah, who has big plans for her partnership with Apple, which she hopes will help her reach a much wider and more diverse audience than she has previously been able to do through her OWN network.

In addition to the book club, Oprah has already announced that she is actively working with Apple on two documentaries for Apple TV+, with one that will take a deeper look at sexual abuse in the workplace through the stories of everyday workers and not just celebrities, and another one on mental health that Winfrey is co-producing with Prince Harry.

At this point, however, it sounds like Oprah’s projects for Apple TV+ will be focusing on more specialized productions. While the venerable producer and talk-show host hasn’t ruled out the possibility of doing a regular interview series beyond the book club’s infrequent profiles, she has also stated that she doesn’t want to be forced into a daily rhythm of trying to find people to interview just for the sake of doing a show. Instead she wants to focus on projects that will help education and inform the larger audience of Apple users on serious issues.