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The on-line bookshop Amazon.com publishes an on-going bestseller list of the books most in demand by its readers at any given moment. It makes fascinating reading, listing as it does hundreds of thousands of books in order of their popularity. At present, number one on the list, narrowly beating Delia Smith and Frank McCourt, is one of JK Rowling's Harry Potter books. It is the fourth volume in the series.
Nothing surprising in that; as everyone knows, Harry Potter is enormously popular, and the books have proved a great success with all sorts of readers. There's only one thing about this that might cause the eyebrows to raise a little. The fourth volume of Harry Potter hasn't been published yet, and won't be until July. Amazon's bestseller, in short, is a book that doesn't exist.
The Harry Potter story has been told a thousand times by now, and the colossal success of the series shows no sign of abating. Indeed, if anything, enthusiasm seems to be growing as word-of-mouth spreads beyond the traditional book-reading classes. How JK Rowling, a single mother, mapped out a series of books about a schoolboy wizard after giving up on an unsatisfactory marriage to a Portuguese drop-out; how she wrote the first book in cafes to keep warm, since she could not afford to heat her flat.
The first volume was published, launched with little in the way of fanfare - and then it took off, making its way from hand to hand in the classroom. Children who had previously shown no interest in reading could suddenly be found in the corners of the playground with a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Miraculously, children seemed willing to stretch themselves by deciphering unfamiliar words, just to be able to read about Harry Potter and his marvellous adventures.
The second volume, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was an even bigger success, and by the time of the third volume, Bloomsbury found it necessary to delay the publication time until the afternoon, so great was the risk that children would bunk off school to buy a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. For days afterwards, the high streets were filled with children reading as...