The New York Times

July 11, 2007 Wednesday
Late Edition – Final

“Potter Magic Has Limited Effect On Youngsters' Reading Habits”

 by Motoko Rich

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, 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’ 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.''

Educators agree that the series can't get the job done alone.  ''Unless there are scaffolds in place for kids -- an enthusiastic adult saying, 'Here's the next one' -- it's not going to happen,'' said Nancie Atwell, the author of ''The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers'' and a teacher in Edgecomb, Me.  ''And in way too many American classrooms it's not happening.''

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.

''Anyone who has children or grandchildren sees the competition for children's time increasing as they enter adolescence, and the difficulty that reading seems to have to compete effectively,'' Mr. Gioia said.  Many thousands of children have, indeed, gone from the Potter books to other pleasure reading. But others have dropped away.

Starting when Avram Leierwood was 7, he would read the books aloud with his mother, Mina. ''We'd sit in the treehouse in our backyard and take turns,'' recalled Ms. Leierwood, of South Minneapolis.  But while Ms. Leierwood has remained an avid fan, Avram, now 15, is indifferent. When ''Deathly Hallows'' comes out, he will be on a canoe trip. As for reading, he said: ''I don't really have much time anymore. I like to hang out with my friends, talk, go watch movies and stuff, go to the park and play ultimate Frisbee.''

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 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 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade in 1998, the year ''Sorcerer's Stone'' was published in the United States. 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.  ''Parents will say, 'You know, my son never spent time reading, and now my son is staying up late reading, keeping the light on because he can't put that book down,' '' said Linda B. Gambrell, president of the International Reading Association, a professional organization for teachers.

In a study commissioned last year by Scholastic, Yankelovich, a market research firm, reported that 51 percent 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.

Before she discovered Harry Potter, Kara Havranek, 13, spent most of her time romping outside in Parma, a suburb of Cleveland, or playing video games like Crash Bandicoot.  But four years after struggling through ''Sorcerer's Stone,'' Kara has read and reread all six books, decorated her bedroom with Potter memorabilia and said she could hardly wait for ''Deathly Hallows.''  But although Kara said she has enjoyed other books, she was not sure what lasting influence the series would have. ''I probably won't read as much when Harry Potter is over,'' she said.

In a way that was previously rare for books, Harry Potter entered the pop-culture consciousness. The movies (the film version of ''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,'' the fifth in the series, just opened) heightened the fervor, spawning video games and collectible figurines. That made it easier for kids who thought reading was for geeks to pick up a book.  Until Harry Potter, ''I don't think kids were reading proudly,'' said Connie Williams, the school librarian at Kenilworth Junior High School in Petaluma, Calif. ''Now it's more normalized. It's like, 'Gosh we can read now, it's O.K.' ''

But creating a habit of reading is a continuous battle with kids who are saturated with other options. During a recent sixth-grade English class at the John W. McCormack Middle School in the Dorchester section of Boston, Aaron Forde, a cherubic 12-year-old, said he loved playing soccer, basketball and football. On top of that, he spends four hours a day chatting with friends on MySpace.com, the social networking site.  He had read the first three Harry Potter books, but said he had no particular interest in reading more. ''I don't like to read that much,'' he said. ''I think there are better things to do.''

Neema Avashia, Aaron's English teacher, said it was rare for the Harry Potter series to draw reluctant readers to books. ''I try to have a lot of books in my library that reflect where kids are coming from,'' Ms. Avashia said. ''And Harry Potter isn't really where my kids are coming from.'' She noted that her class is 85 percent nonwhite, and Harry Potter has few characters that belong to a racial minority group.

Some reading experts say that urging kids to read fiction in general might be a misplaced goal. ''If you look at what most people need to read for their occupation, it's zero narrative,'' said Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford University. ''I don't want to deny that you should be reading stories and literature. But we've overemphasized it,'' he said. Instead, children need to learn to read for information, Mr. Kamil said, something they can practice while reading on the Internet, for example.  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 Public School 54 on Staten Island, a group of fifth grade boys shouted with enthusiasm for the ''Cirque du Freak'' series by Darren Shan, 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 Vincent Eng, a wiry 11-year-old. 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.''

The Advertiser (Australia)
July 19, 2007 Thursday
State Edition

“You May Be Magic but You Can't Keep Us Reading”

by Deborah Bogle, Books Editor

The decade-long publishing phenomenon that is Harry Potter draws to a close this weekend.  As one U.S. bookseller noted in his newsletter this week: ''It will quite likely be the last time in any of our lifetimes that people will line up in the middle of the night all across the country, and all across the world, to buy a book - to see what happens next in a story''.  The only other comparable publishing event, he ventured, was the serialisation of Charles Dickens's “The Old Curiosity Shop” more than 150 years ago, when crowds waited on the docks in New York for the ship bearing the latest installment, ''calling out to the passengers and crew, 'Is Little Nell dead'?''

Will Harry die? Maybe.  Dead or alive, it's likely that he will continue to weave his magic over young readers without the hysteria of new releases.  But have J.K. Rowling's books had an enduring impact on the reading habits of young people?  It is taken as gospel that Harry Potter has inspired a generation of children to discover the joys of reading for pleasure.  The sales figures for the series so far - 325 million books sold worldwide, more than 8 million in Australia - are extraordinary.

There is ample anecdotal evidence from parents saying that, before Harry Potter, their children had never picked up a book - but had devoured a hefty new Potter release within days.  How does that fit with the evidence to a Senate inquiry into academic standards among Australian school children last week that nearly a third of all Australian 15 year olds have not achieved a level of reading proficiency ''needed to meet the demands of life-long learning''?  The federal education bureaucrats also warned literacy skills ''are not improving over time''.

It is 10 years since “Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone” was released.  But look at the graphs tracking the percentage of Year 3, 5 and 7 students who achieved reading benchmarks from 1999 to 2005 (National Report on Schooling 2005) and no upward curve is evident.  There has long been a concern that youngsters read less as they grow older.  By the time they reach high school there are more pressing demands on their time, from extra homework to blossoming social lives, not to mention the pull of digital technologies from iPods to YouTube. The New York Times last week reported on findings by the American Endowment for the Arts that showed children read less as they grew older.  While the Potter craze had lured many children to read, one blockbuster every couple of years hadn't been enough to reverse the decline. Young people continued to read less at pretty much the same rate as they had before J.K. Rowling cast her spell.

In Australia, it's hard to find a matching set of statistics. “Young Australians Reading: From Keen to Reluctant Readers,” was published in 2001 by the Australian Centre for Youth Literacy.  Focusing on 10 to 18 year olds, it found that while 76 per cent of primary students read ''every few days'', that number dropped to only 46 per cent among secondary students. Centre project director Mike Shuttleworth says an updated study will be released in about 2009.  ''It's been a big five years,'' he says of the time elapsed since the last survey.

The Harry Potter craze had gathered force and mobile and internet technologies had proliferated at a dizzying rate.  Mr. Shuttleworth says that so far, anecdotal evidence in Australia follows the U.S. trend.  ''You only have to look at the experience of reading in schools and we see teenagers who find reading something that they don't enjoy,'' he says.  ''There's a pressure on them to read for learning and assessment, but it's not something they do for pleasure.  ''If you look at the take-up rate of the (Victorian) Premier's Reading Challenge, there's a bulge around the middle Years 4 to 7 and then it tapers off.''  Similarly, fewer older students take up the SA Premier's Reading Challenge.  However, there was an 80 per cent increase in the number of Year 9s and a 44 per cent increase in the number of Year 7s taking part in 2005-06.

South Australian English Teachers Association president Guy Bailey Jones cautions against confusing literacy benchmarks with reading habits.  ''Encouraging children to read for pleasure is not all you have to do to make them literate,'' he says. Just because a child can read a novel, it does not mean he or she is able to comprehend a maths textbook or read a film script.  It is not surprising that children read less for pleasure as they age, he adds, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they are reading less. “There are a lot of other text types you need to be skilled in,'' he says.  As for Harry Potter's impact on reading, he says: ''The evidence from teachers is that the books have turned kids on to reading.  More kids are using libraries as a result of Harry Potter.''  It has encouraged adolescent boys to read, he says.

Undeniable is Harry Potter's impact on publishing.  Mr. Shuttleworth says: ''It has created an enormous audience for fantasy literature.''  Without Harry Potter, there would have been no Monster Blood Tattoo series, published by SA imprint Omnibus.  ''Harry Potter has certainly changed what we read,'' he says.  ''Whether it's changed how much we read . . . I'm a bit of a Harry Potter
skeptic.''