Why we left Oprah's book club

"The biggest obstacle we've had to deal with as a group was the reformatting of the Oprah book club website.  We ended up losing years of books discussions.  It was really disappointing."

Chris of Chrisbookarama wrote that for the Book Club Exchange on Booking Mama's blog back in December of 2009, and I found it.  Oprah was originally on AOL, where I was known as BoJacobs in her discussion groups (my profile picture was that animated orange cat GIF above).  We, too, ended up losing years of discussions.

Actually, we had more than one Oprah group.  Some us read and discussed at least two or three books every month, with groups reading different additional books besides Oprah's book club picks.  We lost years of several discussion threads.  One of my groups on Oprah called ourselves "Book Buddies," so that's what I called our new primary online book club.  Here's the very first post on Book Buddies, and you can read in the comments the excitement from people in our various Oprah groups, as well as some who were new to our group.  (I tend to invite everybody I know.)

Another of our Oprah groups discussed books set in countries "around the world," which became my Book Around the World blog.  Our Essencia Island became a private blog for the Book Buddies to party with each book's characters ― or as I said at the top of the blog, it was "a place for Book Buddies to relax and party."  This pleasant sunset scene is at the top of the blog.

Gerry also commented on the shock we all felt when Oprah just threw us away:

"I was truly shocked to see Oprah delete us all.  Oh well!  Time to move on.  Bonnie I love the blog."

Teddy agreed with our assessment:

"I'm glad you set this up. I am fed up with Oprah as well and have moved the Classics Club book discussions to Yahoo groups. I can't beleive Harpo deleted all of our book clubs without prior notice and there will be no way to retreive our old messages. Thats unaceptable in my books!"

We no longer trusted Oprah and moved our book groups to new places.  Book Buddies is my own online book club, where our discussions will live on until Blogger (now Google) decides to throw away what we wrote.  See the sidebar of Book Buddies for a list of books we discussed between 2007 and 2016 before interest died out.