A chasm appeared in the literary world two weeks ago when it was announced that Richard & Judy's chatshow was being cancelled. In their heyday, the duo's book club helped to sell more than 30m books.

But while booksellers and publishers were mourning the loss of a revenue stream, Jonathan Ross has stepped into the breach, launching his own book club on Twitter - at #wossybookclub - and sending his quarter of a million followers off to buy his first pick, Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats. Its Amazon sales rose by 7,000% after it was selected by Ross on Sunday, and its publisher is rushing through a reprint and an ebook version in time for its Twitter dissection this weekend.

"Clearly his recommendations have had an impact [and] the book trade would love it if it were to succeed," says Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of the Bookseller. "The loss of Richard & Judy is a big worry - £180m of books in six years - it's a big chunk out of the book trade." As yet, it's too early to say if #wossybookclub can step into a Richard and Judy-shaped hole, but what of Ross's reading list? Next up for his weekly book club are graphic novel Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan, Shalom Auslander's memoir Foreskin's Lament and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. "He's obviously going for slightly provocative, unexpected choices, but why not?" says Dr Kasia Boddy, a senior English lecturer at UCL. "Whitman's poems aren't the most twittery, in that they're quite long, but there's something for everyone in Leaves of Grass. Whitman was really about opening up poetry to all different kinds of experience, so he would have been interested in things like Twitter."

So far there's no news about who - if anyone - might replace R&J on television, but can we suggest Stephen Fry, who'd be bound to provide some eclectically erudite book choices, as one possibility? And Alan Titchmarsh - chatshow host and novelist - "would be the housewives' favourite", adds Denny.