Our willpower is being tested. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final installment in the Harry Potter series, has been leaked onto the Internet. Scheduled for release this Saturday, the book fell into the hands of a grinch who took a picture of every page and made it available on BitTorrent. Spoilers are everywhere and it’s only going to get worse…if you really want to avoid them you better go camping for the next few days.
It’s a fitting end though, considering that Harry Potter’s viral popularity was achieved thanks to the web. As a recent USA Today article pointed out, the Internet allowed a “new kind of immersion in fandom” previously unheard of. Youth across the world united over the series, and a “participatory culture” was born. Just look at sites like The-Leaky-Cauldron and Mugglenet.com, the latter started by a 12 year old now in his 20s.
The end of the series has the book industry worried, though. Harry Potter definitely got people of all ages reading again, but especially young boys. It’s been called a “gateway drug” and for good reason: 51% of HP youth readers said that they didn’t read for fun before the series. Most analysts, however, are afraid that it wasn’t enough to change a long trend of low reading rates. The amount of people 18-24 that read has decreased 28% in the last 20 years to 42.8%. In comparison, 95.7% of Americans watch an average of an hour or more of TV a day with the average clocking 2.9 hours. Here’s a report from the National Endowment for the Arts….they’re really worried. Will reading rates die with Harry Potter? Or Hermione? Or Ron? Shhhhh, don’t tell us who gets it in the end!!!!
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1 » Harry Potter Inspires Political Activism » Next Great Thing // Jul 24, 2007 at 2:49 pm
[…] On Online As we’ve mentioned before, and as this outpouring suggests, book reading has never been so interactive. Bereft fans are […]
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