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Letter to the editor

A book of magic

Harry Potter changed the publishing industry and the attitudes of the young toward reading. And now?

By COLETTE BANCROFT Times Book Editor
Published July 15, 2007

The answers to many of the questions about the Harry Potter saga will be revealed this week. But debate will go on over whether Harry achieved a real magical feat: inspiring children to read for pleasure.

In some ways it's an important question - for my money, there's nothing more useful and wonderful you can give any child than a lifelong love of reading.

In other ways, it's a silly question. Achieving higher literacy isn't J.K. Rowling's job, and no one book or series, no matter how beloved, can transfigure an entire generation noted for its short attention span.

Besides, I think it may be just as important that so many grownups are reading Harry Potter.

There's no question a huge passel of kids have read the books about the boy wizard. In 10 years, the first six books have sold more than 325-million copies in 63 languages. They are the bestselling audiobooks ever, with more than 5-million copies sold.

According to a Nielsen survey released this week, 28 percent of all people age 12 and older in the United States have read one or more Harry Potter books. Fifteen percent have read all six. When the seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is published Saturday, it will have a record-shattering first printing of 12-million copies - just in the United States.

All this in a postliterate era when reading books is supposedly a dying pastime, just this side of crocheting antimacassars in the ranking of cool stuff to do. Of course, there is a postliterate element even to Harry Potter: the legions of parents who don't read the books but instead listen to them on CD in the car.

No matter. Teachers, librarians and parents have praised the Harry Potter books not only for their enthralling stories but for prodding kids to read other books as well. Certainly many of the youngsters who happily pore through books more than 700 pages long will go on to other literary pleasures.

But research shows that children continue to lose interest in reading for pleasure as they become teenagers at about the same rate today as they did before the Potter phenomenon. Alas, even wizards find it hard to compete with high tech and hormones. Whether some of Harry's original young fans might return to books as they grow up remains an open question.

There's no question that Harry transformed the children's book publishing industry. Speaking at the Phoenix Rising convention of more than 1,000 adult Potter fans in New Orleans in May, Susan Aikens, children's book buyer for Borders, said the series "introduced big money, huge sales and crossover acceptance" to kids' books.

Before Harry, children's books were a "small but well-loved corner" of publishing. Rowling's success revolutionized it, opening the doors for longer books for kids, more of them published in hardback and at higher prices, and fed a burgeoning young adult fiction market as well.

In 2000, the New York Times created, for the first time, a children's bestseller list - in the wake of complaints from publishers that the Potter books were hogging all the top spots on the general fiction list.

And the Potter phenomenon has been instrumental in weaving together old media and new. Its presence not only in movies but on the Internet is enormous, and that has fundamentally changed the way books of all kinds are sold. These days an author of any kind without a Web presence is as rare as a blast-ended skrewt.

But before all that happened, the first Potter book, published in the United States in 1998 as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, was an unknown quantity. Aikens said that Borders, then a chain of about 240 stores, initially bought 3,900 copies.

"The book did okay," she said, "then NPR did a piece and it took off."

Maybe a handful of precocious tots choose their reading material by listening to NPR, but not many. "It was adults buying this book for kids, and for themselves," Aiken said.

There's no way to know how much of Rowling's readership is grown up. But adult devotion to Harry is evident at events like Phoenix Rising, just one of several conventions each year that draw thousands of scholars, fan fiction writers and other enthusiasts; and at hugely popular Web sites like MuggleNet, the Leaky Cauldron and the Harry Potter Lexicon, run and largely used by grownups.

Analyzing why so many adults have responded to what are ostensibly kids' books could keep a battery of scholars busy, but there are some obvious reasons.

Part of the charm for kids of Rowling's style is that she never talks down to them; her tone is closer to adult fiction than to many children's books. Her subject matter, too, is sometimes fun and sometimes fearlessly serious: Grief, depression, death and moral responsibility are among the threads that tie the novels together.

She has a sophisticated verbal wit and a deep understanding of symbol and myth, she creates complex characters, and the woman just tells a cracking good story.

All that may add up to the rarest quality of the unique phenomenon of Harry Potter: The books are something adults and kids can share. Sure, many parents read to and with their kids. But how many other children's books inspire households to buy multiple copies so everyone - including Mom and Dad - can read them at the same time?

For good or ill, kids copy their parents. Harry's young fans might forget about the magic while they're teenagers, but as they become adults, if they hold memories of sharing those books with parents who were as excited about reading them as they were, they might find their way back to the printed page.

Some spells just take a little longer to work.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

[Last modified July 14, 2007, 19:45:26]