Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Why Harry Ain't Enough
Wednesday, July 11, 2007

I was at a dinner on Tuesday tonight and was seated next to an executive at Harry Potter's publisher who talked about the extreme crisis in childhood reading habits. Young people don't just do one thing at a time anymore, he said. They watch TV and IM. They do their homework and listen to music. They do whatever and surf the computer. That's fine for most media, of course, but for books it's a disaster. Especially for fiction. The children's book business is in a tizzy trying to figure out how how to solve this problem.

As it happens, the NYT has a piece about this in the paper on Wednesday. Their hook is that Harry Potter hasn't changed reading habits as many people had hoped.

As the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.

There is no doubt that the books have been a publishing sensation. In the 10 years since the first one, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” was published, the series has sold 325 million copies worldwide, with 121.5 million in print in the United States alone. Before Harry Potter, it was virtually unheard of for kids to queue up for a mere book. Children who had previously read short chapter books were suddenly plowing through more than 700 pages in a matter of days. Scholastic, the series’s United States publisher, plans a record-setting print run of 12 million copies for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the eagerly awaited seventh and final installment due out at 12:01 a.m. on July 21.

But some researchers and educators say that the series, in the end, has not permanently tempted children to put down their Game Boys and curl up with a book instead. Some kids have found themselves daunted by the growing size of the books (“Sorcerer’s Stone” was 309 pages; “Deathly Hallows,” will be 784). Others say that Harry Potter does not have as much resonance as titles that more realistically reflect their daily lives. “The Harry Potter craze was a very positive thing for kids,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who has reviewed statistics from federal and private sources that consistently show that children read less as they age. “It got millions of kids to read a long and reasonably complex series of books. The trouble is that one Harry Potter novel every few years is not enough to reverse the decline in reading.”

Posted by B Feiler at 7:05 AM
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