For a business that's supposedly dying, or at least surely out of touch with “new media,” there has been a lot of aggressive Internet-related book activity this past week. First, there was the announcement that Oprah had expanded her idea of a book club pick by choosing A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle, and then going all out for spiritual synergy. Instead of just suggesting people read the book and then bringing the author onto her show for a discussion of it—the typical Oprah book club experience—Oprah will invite her readers to join her and the author on her Web site for a 10-week “interactive class” in finding their higher selves.

The next day, the New York Times announced that Daniel Menaker, late of Random House, will produce and appear in a TV show about books—on the Internet. Shot in a television studio with five cameras, Titlepage will showcase several authors in each hourlong segment, first in short individual interviews and then in a roundtable. One of the reasons this will be a Web-only production—beyond the fact, presumably, that despite real sets and all those cameras, this is far cheaper than a “real” TV show—is that viewers can decide what, how much and when they watch. “In other words,” Menaker said, “they can choose to fast-forward from Steve Martin to Martin Amis.”

And then came the announcement that the spoken-word audio company Audible Inc.—which has had partnerships in the past with Apple (whose founder Steve Jobs just last month opined that Amazon's Kindle is unimportant because “nobody reads anymore”)—is being sold to a more book-friendly entity: Amazon.

What's going on here? Could it be that publishers are finally waking up—or being forced, through their proponents (Oprah) and retailers (Amazon) to wake up—to the realities of the digital age? We can be a churlish lot, we book people, and our tendency to like to do things the way we've always done them is well-documented/lamented. But suddenly, it seems we're reaching some sort of critical mass. Have I mentioned that I got more responses to my stories about my now long-lost Kindle than to just about any other editorial I've written in PW? And that while Jeff Bezos hasn't yet sent me a complimentary replacement—the device is often sold out, after all, having been even more popular than expected—Hachette CEO David Young did send me a Sony E-reader loaded with Hachette titles and promised to show me how to download galleys to it. And last week, I interviewed the nearly 70-year-old author Russell Banks, who told me at New York's AWP that he thought fears of Internet reader-siphoning were greatly exaggerated: “I'm not worried about it,” he said. “I'm interested in it.”

Put another way: if the very, very bookish Dan Menaker, a guy who cut his teeth at the pre-Internet New Yorker, has gone over to the “other side,” can the rest of us be far behind?

Stay tuned, as we used to say.

Or, well, log on.

Agree? Disagree? Tell us at www.publishersweekly.com/saranelson