Has Harry Potter made the trend for longer children's books fly?

New research from Booklist shows page counts have grown 173% over 40 years, and suggests that JK Rowling’s boy hero may be responsible for large increase in early 2000s

Children’s novels have almost doubled in length over the last 40 years, according to research from US review journal Booklist, which attributes the growth to the popularity of the Harry Potter novels.

Booklist’s Briana Shemroske looked at issues of Booklist from five decades: 1976, 1986, 1996, 2006 and 2016, focusing on the 111-year-old journal’s coverage of middle-grade fiction – books aimed at readers between the ages of eight and 12. In 1976, she found that the average page count of a novel was just over 100 pages. By 1986, this had increased to almost 140 pages per novel. While it stayed around the same level in 1996, by 2006 the average was about 175 pages. This year, the average is 290, an increase of 173% over 40 years.

Related: The big question: are books getting longer?

Until Harry Potter, publishers believed children had short attention spans

Continue reading...