Never Tickle a Sleeping Booklover: How Readers Devour Harry Potter

With 400 million copies of her books in print, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has turned an entire iGeneration on to the old-fashioned pleasures of reading “proper” novels. But how do her readers read the holy writ? Detailed analysis of a Harry Potter database, consisting of several hundred qualitative interviews, suggests that there are four Rowling reading styles: Gryffindor (enthusiastically competitive); Slytherin (unhealthily compulsive); Ravenclaw (forensically critical); and Hufflepuff (comfortably numb). After considering these magical reading modes, the paper compares them to G.P. Stone’s classic typology of consumer behavior.



Citation:

Anthony Patterson and Stephen Brown (2009) ,"Never Tickle a Sleeping Booklover: How Readers Devour Harry Potter", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36, eds. Ann L. McGill and Sharon Shavitt, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 188-189.

Authors

Anthony Patterson, University of Liverpool, UK
Stephen Brown, University of Ulster, UK



Volume

NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36 | 2009



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