Ed2 – The ASDA thing is fascinating to me, but mostly because my background is a world where nobody stops shipment due to lack of payment. Adn when it’s cited as a reason for withholding product, well, that suggest there’s more to the story.

Jill and Shanna – Love the back and forth and think there’s a lot of truth in what you’re both saying. Pratchett, for my money (and I’m admittedly not a sci fi/fantasy freak, though, oddly, I love the genre; I am a mass of contradictions), doesn’t grab me the same way. The Potter books truly cross generations. I didn’t get the same sense from Pratchett. For my money, Robin Hobb is a far better choice, though, like Pratchett, she’s creating denser, more adult worlds.

Don — the cutting out the middle man thing is what’s happening in the music business. Your homework is to read the history of Clap Your Hands, Say Yeah. Mistakes were made but concepts were proven. The Stephen King experiment is often cited as proof that the model won’t work. I see it as proof that the model wasn’t well-considered. Give the people what they want, and, well, they’ll keep coming back.

Forrest — great comment on intimacy. It’s a problem with fiction when the reader feels like he or she is distanced from the story. I mean, I want to be immersed in a world. I love it when I look up and realize I’ve been reading for hours. Nothing better.

Booklover (presumably not your real name) — Price matters. Price really matters. I’m sorry, but the divide between rich and poor is like the Grand Canyon. Books must be affordable if they are to be read.

In the “Star Trek” episode of FUTURAMA, Fry says: “It made me feel like I could have friends, even though I didn’t.”

HP has that characteristic of intimacy. Terry’s stuff (which I used to order from the UK because I couldn’t stand the wait) doesn’t. Very little fiction I’ve read does.

I guess the chains are so tied to publisher co-op money that they don’t have room to re-do the front-of-store displays, but from what I saw, if they’d even done one front-of-store display of “what to read next” books instead of the usual new releases display, they’d have sold a lot more books that night. It’s a captive audience, and once you’ve made your wand and had your picture taken with a costumed character, you need something else to do, so you might as well shop for books. True, a lot of those readers aren’t looking for anything else, but with such a HUGE readership, even a small percentage being turned on to more would still be highly profitable and would make it more than worthwhile to set up a special display or two to help them find new stuff while they’re in the store, or maybe even have a discussion about other books as part of the night’s activities (for those who don’t want to make a magic wand).

If you were a fan, how much would you pay for the first chapter? The next chapter? For the final chapter? Would it be more or less than $35.00?

As a bookseller, I can tell you that this time is hardly the “golden opportunity to try to move the Harry Potter readers on to other things.” most readers are only interested in Harry Potter.

Most Harry Potter fans are rereading the entire series in preparation for the final book. They did the same thing two years ago with the release of book 6.

And yes, we’ve tried to move Harry Potter readers onto other things. It’s the logical thing to do, and it’s been tried before. It’s just that, for many different reasons, the readers don’t take. And these are with adult books, not YA (which is a pity because YA fantasy can provide a lot of gems for readers of all ages). I can see why someone who might really like Harry Potter might struggle with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell or His Dark Materials. Why Harry Potter readers still ignore Terri Pratchett even after it has been constantly recommended to them (both by booksellers and by the media), I will never know.