Yes yet another Harry Potter thread. I liked the earlier books only moderately but I wasn’t planning to buy the new one. However I guess I got sucked into the hype and so far I am enjoying the book thoroughly.
Anyway, one of the pleasures of reading the book is the knowledge that there are probably hundreds of thousands of people reading it at the exact same moment and maybe hundreds reading the exact same page as you. People all over the world and of all ages.
Has there ever been a novel that has sold so many copies so quickly around the world?
Well, no i don’t think there have been this many before, for the same reason we’re always breaking “biggest”, “most popular” records all the time- there are just more people than ever before. And there’s a better distribution system. Books translated into many languages and shipped all over the world before they were even released simply didn’t happen before.
But the phenomenon of a whole society all ummm…on the same page…has happened. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, maybe? And I’ve heard they lined up on the piers to await the latest installment of Dickens from England, which must have been kind of Harry Potter-like (back then they wanted to know if Little Nell was dead…who was it who dies this time?..I haven’t read it :D)
I think that Dickens would be possibly the closest that we have come to this before. He published his chapters in a monthly magasine that had a relatively large circulation.
Whilst, obviously, more people have read HP at the same time than Dickens readers, I would say that proportionally it was pretty similar and aso in terms of importance and publishing phenomena.
Dickens was one of my suggestions too. There was a frenzy when certain of Byron’s works were published too - it has since been compared to Beatlemania. However, HP will still beat every other novel on a numbers basis, for the reasons betenoir gave, plus the increase in literacy.
I haven’t got the book yet, because I dislike hardbacks. I do feel a bit left out now. The Order of the Phoenix isn’t just a book, it’s an event.
People in Great Britain used to get together for group readings of Pamela, which is considered by some to be one of the earliest novels. Definitely, it was enormously popular. I wonder whether a higher percentage of the population read Pamela than are currently reading Order of the Pheonix? Probably not.
My mother told me when she was a teenager and Gone with the Wind (the book) came out everyone was reading it. I can’t testify to that and I am hard pressed to find a cite.
While not exactly a book, when Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories came out in the Strand magazine at the end of the 19th century, I have heard they would be sold out all over London (and I imagine Great Britain as well) in minutes.
Yes there are probably several religious texts which have a bigger readership at any given moment which is why I used the word “novel” .
BTW how many countries has the book been released apart from UK and the US. Has it been released in every other English-speaking country? What about the translations? IIRC the French release will take a few months but I don’t know about the others. I suspect, though, that many people around the world have just ordered the English edition.
I have just acquired a Holmes anthology that was published in the wake of Hound of the Baskervilles (but before the second set of short stories started being published) and the foreward talks about the lines at the printers waiting for the book and the enthusiasm for the upcoming short stories.
Other than the increase in literacy caused by the Harry Potter books themselves, I don’t think there has been an increase. Sure, more people are capable of reading now than ever before, but I understand that the proportion of people who actually do read has remained fairly constant through history.
And, of course, the fact that J. K. Rowling has singlehandedly increased that number so much is a point for Harry Potter, not against.
Even if I go along with your opinion that the proportion of literate people who choose to read for pleasure has remained the same, that still means that the number of people who read for pleasure must have increased, as there simply are many more people who can read. So literacy has affected how many people might be reading a book at any one time.
I think you’re right that HP probably has helped literacy in children. In teaching it’s considered a ‘breakthrough book’ - one that reluctant readers will be encouraged to read and then move onto other books. It would be hard to prove conclusively, though.
Of course, there are probably quite a few adults who don’t usually read but who have nevertheless read HP too. But they couldn’t do so if they were illiterate.
Chronos – Depends on what you mean by “throughout history.” The percentage of people who buy books today is probably not as different as the percentage who bought books in 1903 or 1953 as you might think, despite the rise of movies, TV, radio, video games, etc.
On the other hand, the proportion of people who bought books in 2003 is vastly larger than the proportion of people who bought books in 1003 or 1403, when the vast majority of the population was both illiterate and unable to afford a luxury item such as a hand-crafted book.
I think this has to be a record for the largest number of simultaneous readers for an English-language book, if only due to population growth. That plus the fact that HP5 was published throughout the English-speaking world simultaneously, something that I believe was unheard of as recently as ten years ago.
Cyberpundit – It’s out in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and India. Haven’t checked the rest of the English speaking/English influenced world.
nov·el (nŏv’el) n.: A fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters.
Sounds like a good description of the Bible to me!
And I think this might be a pretty huge phenomenon if you consider that both kids and adults are reading this book. I don’t think too many people under the age of 15 were reading Private Parts.
She won’t ever touch J. K. Rowling’s numbers, but before Terry McMillan got spoiled, rich and a 20-years younger lover, her new releases of WAITING TO EXHALE and HOW STELLA GOT HER GROOVE BACK were ubiquitous among college educated black women. She’s not the draw she used to be-- her last novel, A DAY LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT seemed phoned in – but there was a time in the mid-90s when thousands of black women were reading her stuff.
It’s been fun, while travelling on the trains, to see that brightly-coloured cover in the hands of the most disparate people: an elderly businessman, a twenty-something with a mohawk and multiple face piercings, a frumpy mother with a baby sleeping in his pram, a Hassidic Jew, a woman dressed for a Caribbean wedding … everyone! Funnily enough I haven’t seen any kids reading it yet, but they’re probably at home.
I think this book not only has the most readers ever (so far), but the broadest spectrum of readers too.
