What Will Bookstores Do Without Harry Potter?

J.K. Rowling’s books has sold 325 mil­lion world­wide. Sto­ries have been trans­lated into 65 dif­fer­ent lan­guages. The much antic­i­pated release of the very last Harry Potter book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hal­lows by J.K. Rowling — -is almost here.  Can you feel the excite­ment in the air? As with many local area book­stores across the coun­try, there will be mid­night release sales with plenty of cel­e­bra­tion and sad­ness that this is the final Harry Potter Book. As an aside, I’m told that Rowl­ing plans to kill off two main char­ac­ters — not just the one char­ac­ter that I’d been hearing around on the Inter­net. I’m even more curi­ous now to know who they are because spec­u­la­tion has been that Harry Potter will be offed in the last book? Who would be your guess?

J.K. Rowl­ing has cer­tainly inspired the masses to read. She is a pub­lish­ing phe­nom­e­non and Hol­ly­wood has two more films to make of her books (noth­ing con­firmed as yet for the last book). Rowling’s esti­mated for­tune makes her the first author to become a bil­lion­aire from writ­ing. She still retains the rights to all of her Harry Potter novels. From what I’ve read of Ms. Rowl­ing, she sounds like a very astute busi­ness woman which surprises as to her stance about ebooks.  It has been con­firmed that Ms. Rowling still will not release any of her books in ebook format.  How dis­ap­point­ing. She cites one reason for that is to discourage piracy which is rather ironic con­sid­er­ing that it’s been estab­lished that her work is already being pirated. Her rea­sons are her own and I respect them but I’m sure book­stores across the country are happy  that she will not allow any of her work in any type of dig­i­tal media other than audio books. Despite the fact that ebooks make up a tiny por­tion of the bookselling market. I can’t follow her rea­son­ing. Alas, I’ll have to accept it.

What next for Ms. Rowl­ing and her fans? What other memorable char­ac­ter can she come up with to replace Harry Potter? My wish is that she would write an adult fan­tasy novel. Alas, when it comes down to it, I’ll read whatever she writes as long as it is not overly illus­trated. Her next novel is described as more of an “political fairy story.”  If that’s true,  that already sounds good to me. Also, Ms. Rowl­ing has hinted at a pos­si­ble 8th novel maybe in the form of an Harry Potter Com­pan­ion book. That sounds nice.

What next for book­stores and fans who will come to mourn the loss of Harry Potter and his evil neme­sis Lord Volde­mort? What YA author will  captivate our young  audi­ence now? How about Stephe­nie Meyer? Ms. Meyer has the poten­tial with the huge fol­low­ing from her YA vam­pire series. My book­store is doing a Eclipse Release Day Party for fans on August 7, 2007. My local  Barnes and Noble bookstore still pro­motes her books quite heavily. For those who don’t know, Eclipse is the much antic­i­pated book and the third novel in the Edward and Bella vampire saga. Burn­ing ques­tion for fans is: Will Bella become a vam­pire? She better not or I’ll be a very dis­ap­pointed reader.

Tech­no­rati Tags: J.K. Rowl­ing, Harry Potter Novels, Stephanie Meyer, Eclipse