When not padding course lists with Harry Potter books and writing scholarly articles about them, some academics have also questioned the “cultural infantilism” that has made the classic children’s series a must-read for grownup dinner guests throughout the literate world. But if any publishers share the same view, they certainly aren’t saying.
Even as the Potter era officially ends with the release of the final film of the final book, they remain spellbound and enthralled by its power.
The adventures of Harry and his magical schoolmates have not only attracted an enormous number of adult readers – one in five of the 12 million copies of the books sold in their first decade in Canada went to adults, according to their publisher – they revolutionized the act of reading and with it the entire publishing industry.
“I don’t think there are any limits to the effect Harry Potter has had on the business of reading,” said Trevor Dayton, vice-president in charge of the children’s section at Indigo Books and Music.
As if by magic, the books led a startling reversal in what once seemed to be the inevitable decline in the number of young readers – down 20 per cent in the United States throughout the 1990s, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, but up 21 per cent by 2008.
They were the first to demonstrate the previously unimagined marketing power of social media, with the gaps between books serving as ideal breeding grounds for the kind of early Internet chatter that became equally phenomenal with the advent of Facebook and Twitter. They were the first to turn passive readers into activist fans with insatiable appetites. They made book knowledge a universal cultural requirement, a pattern repeated by the massively bestselling Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer. Not the least, they made formerly separate categories of children’s and adult books “almost indistinguishable,” according to Dayton.
“When I started with Indigo, Kids was a relatively small percentage of the business and the teen category within that was my second-smallest category,” he said. “Today it’s the second-largest category in the store. Fiction is one and Teen is two.”
Adults are currently responsible for borrowing a third of all Young Adult titles circulated by the Toronto Public Library, according to TPL children’s advocate Lisa Heggum, up from almost nothing a decade ago. “It’s a strong trend and I do think Harry Potter led the way,” she said.
Potter publishers initially encouraged the trend by introducing each new book in two editions – one with a cover aimed at children and a second with a deceptively grown-up appearance. “We thought we were being very clever,” said Jamie Broadhurst, vice-president of marketing for Raincoast Books, which published the books in Canada. “What we didn’t figure out was the fact that adults had absolutely no problem reading a book with a children’s cover.”
Spurred by Potter, the crossover appeal of children’s literature continued to buoy traditional publishing as it struggled against the rising tide of electronic innovation. Hardcover sales of children’s books in the United States increased by almost a third in 2009, during which time sales of adult books experienced a double-digit decline. At the beginning of 2009, adults older than 18 bought 70 per cent of all Young Adult titles sold in the country (including those bought as gifts), according to book research firm Bowker LLC. Last year, they accounted for more than three-quarters of all YA sales.
theglobeandmail.com
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire