Can video save the book-publishing star?

What Oprah Winfrey did for novelists on television, Simon & Schuster is hoping to do with online videos.

Simon & Schuster, a part of CBS Corp., is planning to launch in early June an Internet video channel that will feature about 40 short videos of authors talking about their books and what gave them inspiration, as well as walking through the settings of their novels and explaining the context of their stories. The videos will be shown on a site called Bookvideos.tv. They will also be available at Simon & Schuster's site and hosted on one or more major online video sites, the company said.

"I'm 60 years old and I have 11 books in print," said Marianne Wiggins, whose The Shadow Catcher, a fictionalized account of the life of photographer Edward Curtis, will be among the Simon & Schuster videos. "My readers want to see who is the wizard behind the curtain. If I read a book I'm spending at least three to four days with that author in my mind. I want to know who that person is."

With book sales flat and Internet usage, particularly for video, rising fast, it was inevitable that the publishing industry would turn to the Web to help boost sales. From 2002 to 2006, sales for mass-market paperbacks dropped 1.6 percent while books sold in retail stores, including fiction and non-fiction, rose only 3.7 percent, according to figures released this week from the Association of American Publishers (AAP).