ITN and publishers including Penguin, Faber & Faber and Random House have teamed up to create an online book club that uses a YouTube channel and launches today with a video feature on Michael Jackson.

The publishers that have signed up with ITN's multimedia division ITN On are the founding partners of a YouTube portal called Beyond Books.

ITN aims to bring on board other publishers to the channel, which launches today with a video feature on the book Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness, by J Randy Taraborrelli, which will be updated following the singer's death.

Nicholas Wheeler, the managing director of ITN On, said that the YouTube channel will appeal to a younger web generation in the way that Richard & Judy's book club on Channel 4 appealed to a more traditional audience interested in the massive consumer book market, worth £2.5bn in 2008.

"With the success of book clubs on TV, there is clearly an appetite for this type of programming online," he said.

"We look forward to enriching the users' literary experience as well as enticing a new generation to pick up a book."

The launch channel features an interview with Audrey Niffenegger, author of the Time Traveller's Wife, in which she speaks about her latest novel, Her Fearful Symmetry.

A regular feature on the channel will be "Book versus Film", an analysis of how faithful Hollywood adaptations of novels are. The first of these video features will look at the film version of Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper which stars Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric.

ITN On runs a total of six YouTube channels covering areas including news, entertainment, music and video games and reviews.

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