Sat Dec 4, 2010
Seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it. Hasn’t everybody read Harry Potter? Does anybody who goes to a Harry Potter not know what’s going to happen the minute Potter raises his wand? Sadly, yes. For every thousand kids that read the book, there are probably tens of thousands more that find the Potter movies as fresh and entertaining as the Lord of the Rings, precisely because they never even read the books. And now that they’ve watched the films, why bother with the books?
In fact, the Harry Potter movies follow the books so religiously that there’s no real reason to watch the movie if you’ve read the books.
Do kids even read any more? And with the advent of e-book readers with their myriad of multimedia distractions, is the book going to die a shuddering death spurred on by the shouts of tree-huggers who shed a tear for every tree felled to make paper?