OPINION: Stuart Elliott in America.(book sales)

Who would have thought that the hottest consumer product in America would be the lowly, low-tech book?

As the nation heads into the 4 July holiday weekend, shoppers are stocking up on books instead of pricey electronic gadgets, must-have fashions or do-it-yourself projects such as the Cordiant Communications Group Disassembly Kit. It's a trend that just might help shake Madison Avenue out of its present doldrums.

Three books are leading the charge in a rush to reading that's so newsworthy it made headlines in USA Today, the self-styled Nation's Newspaper, which declared: 'Summer reading is so in style.'

One of the blockbuster books is, of course, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling, which might as well be retitled Harry Potter and the Order of 9.3 Million Copies, after the latest total for the record-breaking press run by the US publisher Scholastic.

The second megabook is Living History by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former First Lady, with 1.6 million copies in print, almost 600,000 of them sold in the first week. That was good enough, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster, to qualify as the country's fastest-selling non-fiction title ever. (Pause here to insert knee-jerk japes from conservative readers wondering why it isn't on the fiction list.)

The third superseller is a golden oldie, East of Eden, by John Steinbeck, which is making a sudden, unexpected comeback because the talkshow host Oprah Winfrey picked it as the first tome to be read in the revival of her TV book club. Originally published in 1952, East of Eden had been selling about 40,000 to 50,000 copies annually. Now, since it became ...