Harry Potter's Not Enough

Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people. In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J K Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and
music downloads.

And so it has, for many children. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, 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 US 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 ploughing through more than 700 pages in a matter of days. Scholastic, the series's US publisher, plans a record-setting print run of 12 million copies for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the eagerly awaited seventh and final instalment 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. Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the US, said, "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".

Young people are less inclined to read for pleasure as they move into their teenage years for a variety of reasons, educators say. Some of these are trends of long standing (older children inevitably become more socially active, spend more time on reading-for-school or simply find other sources of entertainment other than books), and some are of more recent vintage (the multiplying menagerie of high-tech gizmos that compete for their attention, from iPods to Wii consoles). What parents and others hoped was that the phenomenal success of the Potter books would blunt these trends, perhaps even creating a generation of lifelong readers in their wake. Many thousands of children have gone from the Potter books to other pleasure reading. But others have dropped away.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the US, a series of federal tests administered every few years to a sample of students in grades 4, 8 and 12, the percentage of kids who said they read for fun almost every day dropped from 43 per cent in fourth grade to 19 per cent in eighth grade in 1998, the year Sorcerer's Stone was published. In 2005, when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book, was published, the results were identical.

Many parents, educators and librarians say that despite such statistics, they have seen enough evidence to convince them that Harry Potter is a bona fide hero. In a study commissioned last year by Scholastic, Yankelovich, a market research firm, reported that 51 per cent of the 500 kids aged 5 to 17 polled said they did not read books for fun before they started reading the series. A little over three-quarters of them said Harry Potter had made them interested in reading other books.

In a way that was previously rare for books, Harry Potter entered the pop-culture conscious-ness. The movies (the film version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth in the series, just opened) heightened the fervour, spawning video games and collectible figurines. That made it easier for kids who thought reading was for geeks to pick up a book.

But creating a habit of reading is a continuous battle with kids who are saturated with other options. Still, there is something about seeing the passion that a novel can inspire that excites those who want to perpetuate a culture of reading. Even as the Harry Potter series draws to a close, there are signs that other books are coming up to take its place.

On a recent afternoon at a public school in New York, a group of boys shouted with enthusiasm for the Cirque du Freak series about a boy who becomes entangled with a vampire. "I like the books so much that even when the teacher is teaching a lesson, i still want to read the books", said 11-year-old Vincent Eng. His classmate Thejas Alex said he had stopped reading a Harry Potter book to jump into Cirque du Freak. "While i was reading them", Thejas said, referring to the Cirque books, "I was like, addicted".

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