Perfect strangers in ‘07: Harry Potter, Kindle

NEW YORK — Three days before Thanksgiving, Amazon.com unveiled its Kindle e-book reader, the latest, and surely not the last, hand-held device meant to bring the centuries-old experience of the printed page to the digital age.

In December, Kindle best sellers included some of the year's most popular books, among them Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love," Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns" and Jessica Seinfeld's "Deceptively Delicious." Actual sales figures were not available.

Absent from the list, and unlikely to appear, was the biggest release of 2007, J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh and final volume of her record-breaking fantasy series.

Rowling has never permitted her work to appear in e-book form and it's not because she's waiting for an instrument to surpass the Kindle, or the Sony Reader, or the Gemstar. Her objection is more philosophical than mechanical. Her books are written in longhand and she has long favored having them read unplugged as well.

"Deathly Hallows" was a triumph of the size and efficiency of modern technology — selling 10 million copies in 24 hours was physically impossible even a few years ago. It also was a triumph of the old-fashioned caress of ink on paper.

It takes a great story
In a year otherwise defined by uninspiring sales and dire forecasts for reading, as compiled by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Potter book demonstrated that nothing sells, or lasts, like the bound text of a great story.

Potter's rise parallels the bumpier history of the e-book. Rowling's debut, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," came out in the United States in 1998, around the same time that the word "e-book" began appearing in the mainstream press.

In 2000, when Potter books were so hot that stores began holding midnight parties to welcome them, e-book fever was peaking. Stephen King's e-story, "Riding the Bullet," was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and digital texts were the talk of that year's BookExpo America. The convention's featured speaker, Amazon.com head Jeff Bezos, predicted that digital texts could well make traditional retailers obsolete.

Over the next few years, e-books cooled from phenomenon to niche, while Potter soared from phenomenon to way of life. No press conference was needed to announce "Deathly Hallows." A brief message appeared one February morning on Rowling's Web site and within hours the book was No. 1 on Amazon.com, and remained so for months. Not even the unauthorized leak of the text online, days before the July 21 publication, kept "Deathly Hallows" from selling faster than any work in history.

"If you go back in time, the landscape is littered with the bodies of dead e-book ... (instruments)," Bezos acknowledged upon introducing the Kindle.

The landscape is also littered with millions of warm and worn Potter books, in hardcover and paper, on shelves around the world, ready to be opened by the next generation of hands.