For those of you who aren’t familiar with The Late Age of Print, the final chapter of the book focuses on the extraordinary literary sensation that is Harry Potter.  So, needless to say, Harry Potter has been on my mind quite a bit lately, especially with today’s release of the first installment of the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I don’t have much to say about the latest film, honestly, not having yet seen it — although I intend to, as I’ve seen the previous six movies and have read/enjoyed all seven books.  Instead, what I’ve been thinking about lately is the age of Harry Potter, or rather that of his fans.

I teach an undergraduate course at the 300 or Junior level called “The Cultures of Books and Reading”; during one week, we focus on the many-headed Harry Potter phenomenon.  When I first launched the book class, back in 2006, I was excited to realize that my students were basically Harry’s contemporaries. Those among them who were  eleven years old — Harry’s age — when the series launched in 1997 were twenty in 2006, which is the typical age of most college Juniors.

But now it’s four years later, and those twenty year-olds are turning twenty-four.  Yes, that’s right, twenty-four — practically a quarter century.  Graduate school age.  Marrying age.  Getting established in one’s career age.  Even baby-having age.  I’m feeling old just writing about them!  Indeed, it’s not just that Harry Potter and the actors who portray him and his friends on screen have grown up.  The whole fan culture surrounding Harry Potter has grown up, too, to the point where, as with Star Wars fans, we might even start thinking about a whole new generation of Potter enthusiasts.

This is what the release of the first installment of the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows really means.  It marks the beginning of the end of the film adaptations, yet it also marks the beginning of the beginning of the next generation of Potter fandom.  What role, if any, will the books, films, toys, games, candy, costumes, etc. play in their lives?  And what new meanings will the Harry Potter franchise take on once the torch gets passed, or rather shared?

I spent the last week vacationing in Paris.  The trip was excellent in itself, but a felicitous discovery along the way made it even better.  A wrong turn while searching for the Pompidou Centre landed my travel companion and I at the Village Voice Bookshop, one of Paris’ best English-language bookstores. Here I am, standing outside the store on the Rue Princesse:

There, while thumbing through the nicely-stocked “Books On Books” section, I was thrilled to discover a copy of…The Late Age of Print!

Thereafter I proceeded to have a lovely conversation with the founder and owner of the Village Voice Bookshop, Odile Hellier, who gave me a crash course in Parisian book culture.  According to Hellier there’s been something of a falloff in bookselling and reading in Paris in recent years, which makes it all the more challenging for English-language shops like hers, whose inventories are not underwritten by the French government, to make ends meet.

That’s all the more reason why I’m thankful not only to have seen The Late Age of Print at the Village Voice but also to have had some good friends purchase the copy while I was there.

Late last week, I promised to report on the “Library 2.0″ Symposium at Yale Law School, in which I participated on April 4th.  I arrived at New Haven with a lovely Keynote presentation to accompany my essay on “Kindle and the Labor of Reading,” only to discover that my laptop had died!  Well, thank goodness for backup — which is to say nothing of the goodwill of Ted Byfield, my session moderator, who just happens to be a Mac/Keynote user.  Whew.  In any event, I expected to issue my Symposium wrap-up this past Monday or Tuesday, but the death of my laptop resulted in my having to push back the schedule a bit.  Thanks for your patience.

All that’s just preamble, I suppose, to my saying that it was a fantastic event through and through.  It brought together an extraordinary group consisting of librarians and library administrators, from places ranging from elite private universities to small rural communities; high-powered practicing attorneys (one who even litigated the Google book scanning case–representing the publishers) and equally high-powered law professors; digital library innovators; and a few humanities professors, like me.  Kudos to the planning committee for making a concerted effort to forestall what so often happens at symposia like these: group think (or the compulsion to engage in it).

What was fascinating to me was to hear about how librarians are navigating a shift in their profession, from their maintaining chiefly archival responsibilities to their increasingly becoming information managers.  (Laura DeNardis, the Executive Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, opened the event with a hilarious video documenting representations of librarians in the popular media, which only threw into relief the degree to which the library profession has so profoundly changed.)   It was also intriguing to hear about the types of new archival problems that get posed within digital contexts, which raise all sorts of questions about privacy, propriety, and responsibility.  My co-panelist Michael Zimmer, for example, discussed the ethics of libraries’ retaining patron borrowing, web browsing, and search information in an age in which “the library” is becoming as much a physical structure as a digital, database-driven “back-end.”

Another theme that reared its head again and again was academic publishing — especially the legal, economic, and scholarly pitfalls that result from the over-concentration of the scholarly publishing industry.  I’ve written on the subject before – from the vantage point of cultural studies — and so I was fascinated to learn what the world of scholarly journal publishing looked like from a library perspective.  Long story short, it doesn’t look good, save for the important Open Access initiatives that have appeared in recent years, which themselves raise all sorts of conundrums about opting out and re-publication.  My favorite moment?  When one conference participant showed a PowerPoint slide depicting concentration in the journal publishing industry, with a gargantuan sphereoid “Elsevier” appearing in red in the middle, as though it were gobbling up all the other companies around it.  She said that she’d shown the slide before, and that it had come to be known colloquially as the “death star” slide.  How apt.

Let’s just hope that the library — a tremendous public resource — doesn’t end up getting consumed by Elsevier or some other evil empire.

P.S. “Library 2.0″ was blogged and Twittered, essentially in real-time, so follow the preceding links if you’d like a more “granular” view of the event.