As part of today’s announcement by parent company NewsCorp, HarperCollins reports third quarter operating income of $29 million, an increase of $3 million versus the same period a year ago. The 12% year-on-year increase included strong sales of books by Sidney Poitier, Laura Schlessinger and Neal Boortz. During the quarter, HarperCollins had 48 books on The New York Times bestseller list, including seven books that reached the #1 spot.

A little more quietly than usual (though no doubt there will be some more fanfare about it today) Oprah Winfrey announced that she will select her next book club pick on Wednesday, the same day Winfrey hosts the author of her current selection, Academy Award-winning actor Sidney Poitier. Amazon already provides some important clues, most notably that the book is published by Vintage – Random House‘s paperback imprint, publishing both reprints from all RH lines and originals – and has an official page count of 304 pages. Scrolling further, Amazon categorizes the book club pick as “novelty” but I suspect that has less to do with content and more to do with Oprah’s designation – or perhaps a sly bit of humor from the online retailer…

Meanwhile, Ron does a quick, dirty Google search on “Vintage” and “304 pages” and comes up with Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin, and Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis, although that last one seems a bit of a stretch for the Oprah crowd. At that point, he says, you might as well toss in Death Comes for the Archbishop as a candidate for all the good it’ll do you. It’s not too hard to see why Winfrey would be interested in the memoir of an autistic scientist who was featured on The View in January, though, and if the book club was about to revisit fiction, a consideration of the psychological impact of human cloning is just enough of a left-field spin on her old book club’s preference for “issue novels” to work. So remember: You read it here first!