Harry Potter and the Half-Grown Reader

James will likely be home, sound asleep.

‘‘It’s about a little wizard boy, and when you’re a teenager you’re just not caring what happens to the guy with the wand,’’ says James, whose diet of non-fiction and the occasional mystery make Harry just so much kid stuff. ‘‘I just wasn’t caught up with them. I never put on a cape and had a wand myself.’’

If the publishers of author J K Rowling’s books have a challenge beyond how to spend the Harry Potter windfall, it is in trying to keep the series compelling for original readers who were 10 to 12 years old when Harry was introduced in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone but who are now heading off to college, jobs or even the war in Iraq.

And while Rowling has hit upon a unique formula of aging Harry as the series progresses—he was 11 in the first and is 16 in the new one—it’s unclear how interesting he will be to older teens on the verge of adulthood.

With a planned initial printing of 10.8 million copies—up from 8.5 million for the fifth book—Harry’s American publisher, Scholastic Books, is investing in its optimism that people like James Webb are rare.

‘‘Of course, we’ve lost some, but I don’t believe we’ve lost (a lot of) readers,’’ says Barbara Marcus, executive vice-president of Scholastic in charge of children’s book publishing. ‘‘I believe we have expanded to parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents. Then we have the new readers. The beauty of the children’s market is that our readers come into the market and they grow with us.’’

The series has done well for Scholastic, which bought the American rights for $105,000 before the first book was published in England. There are more than 103 million books now in print in the US and when a new Harry book comes out it accounts for about 10 per cent of Scholastic’s annual $2.2 billion in revenues.

The first book is the series’ top-seller, and the number in print decreases for each succeeding title even as the initial print runs have increased. Rather than signalling a tail-off in interest, Scholastic says the numbers reflect the amount of time each book has been available, and the high number of young readers growing into the series.

Pre-orders for The Half-Blood Prince were at a record pace at Barnes & Noble stores and its website, with more than 750,000 books sold as of last week, which the retailer said was far ahead of the pace for the last book. As of Friday there were 634,000 books pre-ordered through Amazon.com, but the online bookseller said it did not have comparable data for the last book.

Both retailers were likely aided by the deeply discounted $17.99 sale price against a list price of $29.99, helping make The Half-Blood Prince their top seller almost continuously since pre-orders were accepted in December.

‘‘We’re just starting to see things take off from a customer-anticipation standpoint,’’ says Amazon.com spokeswoman Kristin Mariani. ‘‘If you’re a fan of the series and you’ve read all five books, you have to see what happens next.’’

To help build anticipation—and boost marketing—stores are banned from selling the books before midnight July 16, and won’t receive the books until a day or two before. Most orders through Amazon.com will be delivered on July 16, Mariani says.

Rowling planned a series that would become more complex as it went on. Harry has matured from unloved orphan to wizard-in-training, and the tone has evolved from light fantasy to dark suspense, with death and the fight between good and evil becoming dominant themes.

‘‘It’s the kind of depth and sophistication that can be appreciated by an older age group as well as a very clear and compelling plot line that draws in the younger children,’’ says Arthur A Levine, the Scholastic editor who signed the series. ‘‘It’s never been a book for very young children. In the early stages we thought it would be mostly 10- to 14-year-olds. The unusual qualities of the book were that even though there’s sophisticated wordplay and humour and political satire that is appreciated by older readers, the younger ones are going for the more direct issues of character.’’

As it is, Harry has sparked massive changes in children’s publishing, proving that kids will lay aside their GameBoys and Xboxes for novels that rival Anna Karenina for length.

‘‘Hardcover Harry Potter books have brought kids to a new dimension of reading,’’ says Alex Uhl, a director of the American Booksellers for Children. ‘‘They’ve brought to publishers an interest in publishing better books. The bar has been set pretty high for kids in that age group. They’re pretty sophisticated readers. They love rich language.’’

In fact, Harry’s success has spilled over onto others, such as T A Barron’s Merlin and Avalon series, and the Inheritance trilogy by Christopher Paolini, 19, who began writing the first installment, Eragon, when he was 15.

C S Lewis’ classic, The Chronicles of Narnia, has also seen a resurgence, driven in part by a movie version scheduled for December release that is already being promoted in theatres.

Yet, some bookstore owners and young readers say the advance buzz for the new book isn’t as intense as it was for the last one, perhaps because the release date is still some time away. ‘‘I’m just not feeling the urgency,’’ Uhl said.

Still, the 200 people who signed up for her midnight Potter party is about the same as for the last release. At Once Upon a Story in Long Beach, California, about 100 people have pre-ordered the new book, about half of whom will pick it up at midnight—again similar to the last book, said store owner Julee Morris.

‘‘Harry created an interest in literature and reading that was waning a bit, I think,’’ particularly among 10- to 12-year-old boys, Morris says. Even her 15-year-old daughter is caught up in the series. ‘‘It parallels their lives a little bit, the school issue and the demons to fight.’’

LAT-WP