Regarding whether Harry Potter has boosted youth reading: the signs look bad. Here is what Book Industry Study Group predicts once the series ends: A stunning drop of 42 million in unit sales of juvenile books. That means that a fair portion of all those Potter readers won’t pick up another book, at least not until another kids book fad arises. You can find complementary numbers from the Department of Ed and other agencies and research groups showing that teen reading is acutally slipping, and teen reading comprehension skills falling along with them.

Harry Potter hasn’t changed that. What we need is a dozen popular series out there, not just one, so that a new entry comes out every few months, and when it does we don’t have a world-wide blockbuster event, but the same thing that used to happen when a new Beatles or Stones or Zeppelin or Who or Doors album appeared. Some excitement, everybody buys it and listens, radios play the songs, and life goes on.