Was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the largest book launch there ever will be?
Not only was the recent launch of the book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the largest ever, it is likely to be the largest book launch that there ever will be. I wasn’t there for the launch personally, but curiously, my dad was, and after hearing the story of what it was like, I don’t think it will ever be topped.
My dad was seeing a late showing of the Transformers movie on the night of the launch, and the theater is right near one of the largest book stores in the area. He hasn’t read the previous Harry Potter book, but seeing all of that commotion and people dressed funny, how could he resist? So he got in line to pick up a copy for my mom, who is caught up on the series. He described the scene to me thus.
Thousands of people were waiting in line to get a copy of the book. Every employee of the book store was on call that night. They used a system of numbered wristbands to keep track of who had which position in line; one color for people with preorders, of which there were over a thousand, and another color for walk-ins, like my dad, of which there were at least another thousand (and all of the lucky preorder people got to go first, though there was no shortage of books). The fire marshal had established a strict limit of one thousand customers in the store at a time, so employees with counters in their hand stood at the front door, letting in groups of people in equal numbers as previous customers left, keeping an exact tally of how many were inside the store in case they needed to report that number to the fire marshall. The huge line wandered for blocks outside the store.
The scene was ordered chaos — ordered, because these are readers we are talking about, many of them middle-aged or children — and chaos, because the book store almost never has to deal with events like this, and unlike stadiums, it lacks the permanent infrastructure necessary to handle large crowds. Stadiums put up huge concrete barriers, metal chain link fences, and one-way turnstiles to control large crowds of people, while the best a book store can muster is dragging every single movable segmented pole-with-ribbon from the back room.
So ask yourself, what book in the foreseeable future do you anticipate having as large a launch as Harry Potter? What past book had as large a launch? The only books that comes to mind are the previous Harry Potter books, but they weren’t quite so big. It takes hype building up over the course of a popular series to get the kind of book launch that Harry Potter experienced, and I just don’t see it ever happening again. Dead tree books are on the way out. Granted, it’s happening slowly, but the build-up of a new series to reach Harry Potter-like popularity levels won’t happen over night either. E-books are already taking off like wildfire in countries like Japan and Korea, and once we get good e-book readers here in the United States, they’ll become more popular here too. Despite the lack of a proper e-book reader, I read a digital version of this latest Harry Potter book on my computer, simply because that was more convenient that hunting around in book stores (the one nearest my house was sold out).
Soon, the future of popular book launches won’t be massive crowds at book stores, but rather, lots of fans staying up until midnight in front of their computers, eagerly awaiting the moment when the download begins on their pre-purchased e-book. E-books will eventually come to dominate for one simple reason: convenience. I can carry hundreds of thousands of e-books on an electronic device that is the same size and weight as a single paperback novel. That is very convenient for anyone who travels or goes on vacation. And with low-power OLED screens that don’t need back lights, reading e-book readers is just as comfortable as reading text on a page. E-books are coming, and at the rate that they are gaining popularity, they will significantly dip into dead tree book sales before another popular series hits that critical mass that the Harry Potter series achieved.
So if, like me, you missed the most recent Harry Potter book launch, you missed out on a piece of history — the largest book launch that ever was and ever will be.
