Co-founder of Broken Pencil gets the Oprah seal of approval

Oprah has given her influential seal of approval to Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki in her magazine's summer reading list, according to a post on CBC.ca. His most recent book, The Peep Diaries, is on her list of "25 books you can't put down" in the July issue of O magazine.

If past experience is anything to go by, such an endorsement by the popular television host and eponymous editor of one of the best-selling magazines in the U.S. should result in a substantial uptick in sales.

Niedzviecki is best known to the magazine community for having been the editor and co-founder of Broken Pencil, the magazine about zine culture.

The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbours is about the new culture being created by Twitter, blogs and other social media, changing the definition of privacy and upsetting values we once took for granted.

Cathleen Medwick describes the book on Oprah's site: "'You need to know. You need to be known.' That is the compulsion fueling what cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki calls 'peep culture, the bastard love child of gossip' — our mass addiction to twittering, tweeting, snooping, spying, blogging, gawking at reality TV and YouTube, spilling our secrets on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Ping… the list goes on."