Still wild about Harry?

When the first two Harry Potter novels came out in the late 1990s, Cinda Webb would sit in the upstairs hallway of her Irvine home and read aloud as her two sons drifted off to sleep, visions of wizards dancing in their heads.

Her younger son, Jon, now 14, quickly became entranced and devoured all five books. But her older son, James, now 17, lost interest around the third volume.

So Webb and Jon will join 200 other bleary-eyed Harry fans at Irvine’s Whale of a Tale Children’s Bookshoppe for the midnight July 16 release of the sixth book, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”

James will likely be home, sound asleep.

“It’s about a little wizard boy, and when you’re a teenager you’re just not caring what happens to the guy with the wand,” says James, whose diet of nonfiction and the occasional mystery make Harry just so much kid stuff. “I just wasn’t caught up with them. I never put on a cape and had a wand myself.”

If the publishers of author J.K. Rowling’s books have a challenge beyond how to spend the Harry Potter windfall, it is in trying to keep the series compelling for original readers who were 10 to 12 years old when Harry was introduced in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” but who are now heading off to college, jobs or even the war in Iraq.

And while Rowling has hit upon a unique formula of aging Harry as the series progresses -- he was 11 in the first and is 16 in the new one -- it’s unclear how interesting he will be to older teens on the verge of adulthood. With a planned initial printing of 10.8 million copies -- up from 8.5 million for the fifth book -- Harry’s American publisher, Scholastic Books, is investing in its optimism that people like James Webb are rare.

“Of course, we’ve lost some, but I don’t believe we’ve lost [a lot of] readers,” says Barbara Marcus, executive vice president of Scholastic in charge of children’s book publishing. “I believe we have expanded to parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents. And then we have the new readers. The beauty of the children’s market is that our readers come into the market and they grow with us. There are new children every year who are ready for Harry Potter.”

The series has done well for Scholastic, which bought the American rights for $105,000 before the first book was published in England. There are more than 103 million books now in print in the U.S., and when a new Harry book comes out it accounts for about 10% of Scholastic’s annual $2.2 billion in revenues.

The first book is the series’ top-seller, and the number in print decreases for each succeeding title even as the initial print runs have increased. Rather than signaling a tail-off in interest, Scholastic says the numbers reflect the amount of time each book has been available, and the high number of young readers growing into the series.

Pre-orders for “The Half-Blood Prince” are at a record pace at Barnes & Noble stores and its website, with more than 750,000 books sold as of early this week, which the retailer said was far ahead of the pace for the last book. As of Friday there are 634,000 books pre-ordered through Amazon.com, but the online bookseller said it did not have comparable data for the last book.

Both retailers were likely aided by the deeply discounted $17.99 sale price against a list price of $29.99, helping make “The Half-Blood Prince” their top seller almost continuously since pre-orders were accepted in December.

“We’re just starting to see things take off from a customer-anticipation standpoint,” says Amazon.com spokeswoman Kristin Mariani. “If you’re a fan of the series and you’ve read all five books, you have to see what happens next.”

To help build anticipation -- and boost marketing -- stores are banned from selling the books before midnight July 16, and won’t receive the books until a day or two before. Most orders through Amazon.com will be delivered on July 16, Mariani says.

Rowling’s only U.S. media appearances will be a taped interview on NBC’s “Today” show and an interview with Time magazine. For the release, Rowling will do a midnight reading at Scotland’s Edinburgh Castle in front of 70 young fans selected by newspapers in England and several other countries (but not the U.S.). The fans will be given books and will act as journalists for a kids-only press conference with Rowling.

Tight security over the book’s release has led to some attempts to bust the embargo. London tabloid the Sun reported that thieves offered to sell it a purloined copy of the book three weeks ago, and that when its reporter arrived gunfire broke out. Two men were arrested. The Sun said it had planned to turn the book over to authorities, and Rowling has since obtained a legal injunction barring anyone from violating the embargo in England. Earlier, British bookmakers suspended bets on which character would be killed off in the new book after they noticed a flurry of bets on professor Dumbledore from gamblers in Bungay in Suffolk, where the book is being printed, suggesting details had leaked out.

From the start, Rowling has planned a series that would become more complex as it went on. Harry has matured from unloved orphan to wizard-in-training, and the tone has evolved from light fantasy to dark suspense, with death and the fight between good and evil becoming dominant themes.

“It’s the kind of depth and sophistication that can be appreciated by an older age group as well as a very clear and compelling plot line that draws in the younger children,” says Arthur A. Levine, the Scholastic editor who signed the series. “It’s never been a book for very young children. In the early stages we thought it would be mostly 10- to 14-year-olds. The unusual qualities of the book were that even though there’s sophisticated wordplay and humor and political satire that is appreciated by older readers, the younger readers are going for the more direct issues of character.”

As it is, Harry has sparked massive changes in children’s publishing, proving that kids will lay aside their GameBoys and Xboxes for novels that rival “Anna Karenina” for length.

“Hardcover Harry Potter books have brought kids to a new dimension of reading,” says Alex Uhl, owner of A Whale of a Tale and a director of the American Booksellers for Children. “They’ve brought to publishers an interest in making and publishing better books. The bar has been set pretty high for kids in that age group. They’re pretty sophisticated readers. They love rich language.”

In fact, Harry’s success has spilled over onto others, such as T.A. Barron’s “Merlin” and “Avalon” series, and the planned “Inheritance Trilogy” by Christopher Paolini, 19, who began writing the first installment, “Eragon,” when he was 15. C.S. Lewis’ classic, “The Chronicles of Narnia,” has also seen a resurgence, driven in part by a movie version scheduled for December release that is already being promoted in theaters.

Yet so far, some bookstore owners and young readers say the advance buzz for the new Potter book isn’t as intense as it was for the last one, perhaps because the release date is still three weeks away.

“I’m just not feeling the urgency,” Uhl said. “The anticipation is there but it’s not with the older readers as much as it is with the younger readers.”

Still, the 200 people who signed up for her midnight Harry Potter party is about the same as for the last book release. At Long Beach’s Once Upon a Story, about 100 people have pre-ordered the new book, about half of whom will pick it up at midnight -- again similar to the last book, said store owner Julee Morris.

“Harry created an interest in literature and reading that was waning a bit, I think,” particularly among 10- to 12-year-old boys, Morris says. Even her 15-year-old daughter is caught up in the series. “It parallels their lives a little bit, the school issue and the demons to fight.”

Brooklin Frye, 19, was so taken with Harry Potter that she sought out a job at the San Marino Toy and Book Shoppe last September to be closer to the action. She’s become the shop’s resident Harry expert, part clerk and part apostle for the books. Frye, who lives in San Gabriel, just finished her freshman year at Glendora’s Citrus College, where she says her love for the books puts her at odds with most other students.

“A few of the people that I’ve met in college do read Harry Potter and those who don’t just laugh at me and say it’s for younger kids,” Frye says.

But she thinks the non-fantasy parts have universal appeal.

“Harry and his friends are going through things that kids right now in real life are experiencing -- just with his friends sticking with him and sometime his friends don’t agree with him,” Frye says. “Half of it is, like, real fake, but his character, to me, is very real.”

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The road to Hogwarts

The Harry Potter franchise has been one of the most successful in publishing. After the first five of a planned seven books, there are more than 270 million Harry Potter books in print worldwide, more than 103 million in the United States alone. The release of the sixth book in three weeks will add nearly 11 million copies to that total. The books have been translated into 62 languages. The following numbers are for the U.S. only.

1998: “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” 309 pages, 50,000 initial print run, 26 million in print

1999: “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” 341 pages, 250,000 first printing, 24 million in print

1999: “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” 435 pages, 500,000 first printing, 19 million in print

2000: “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” 734 pages, 3.8 million first printing, 18 million in print

2003: “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” 870 pages, 8.5 million* first printing, 16 million in print

2005: “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” 672 pages, 10.8 million announced first printing

Sources: Scholastic, Times research

*Scholastic announced an initial print run for book five of 6.8 million but increased it before the book was released.