Business Insight Zone

As I write this in the first few minutes of Saturday morning, my wife is with our nine-year-old daughter at a local Barnes & Noble, enjoying a Harry Potter-themed party and, by this point, clinging to a pristine copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. My daughter is attending in the witch costume she wore for Halloween last year.

We haven’t let our daughter stay up so late since — well, ever. But as my wife said earlier tonight, for our daughter this is a “once in a lifetime experience,” and for once that’s not just an exaggeration. Our girl was too young to attend any of the other midnight release parties. (We weren’t only being party poopers: I’m sure she could not have kept herself awake that late two years ago when the last book came out.) She’s a biiiiig book reader, and Harry Potter is the center of her book-reading universe.

Mind you, we already have a copy en route to us from Amazon.com. We ordered it months ago. But today my wife confessed that she was getting antsy, hoping that somehow, despite the strict ban on early deliveries of the book, our UPS driver would swing by with Deathly Hallows in hand. My prediction is that she’ll send my daughter off to bed the moment they get home, and then stay up far too late reading her way into the book. The good news is that, by sometime tomorrow, we’ll have the Amazon copy as well so that there will be less (not none, but less) of “Are you done yet? Is it my turn?”

And I know our little book-addicted family is hardly alone in this. A friend of mine ordered two copies of the book so she wouldn’t have to wait for her ten-year-old son to finish reading it first. She also mentioned that she wanted to shorten the time during which she had to live like a hermit to avoid having someone give away the ending to her. The same sorts of dramas are being played out all over the country — all over the world. Yes, the Harry Potter hype is probably too much, but the truth is that, as a writer, I’m grateful that any book would draw so much positive attention, and especially from whole families. In the scheme of things, it’s a Good Thing for parents and children to have favorite books in common that they can discuss in the car or at the dinner table. While I hardly think that Bloomsbury and Scholastic are publishing the books primarily from a sense of goodwill toward the families of the English-speaking world, this particular publishing endeavor of theirs has some nice social side effects.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go to bed and try not to get too antsy about having my turn to read the book.