The clamor over the Harry Potter books may be a little (ok, a lot) over the top. But Norman Lebrecht says that it’s important to celebrate a publishing phenomenon that flies in the face of what the conventional wisdom about books – and children’s books particularly – insisted was true. “While it is futile to predict the thought processes that will prevail a century hence, when books may have been supplanted by chips and authors by robotic processors, one certainty can be safely asserted. A hundred years from now, millions of people will still be reading Charles Dickens, and they will still be reading Harry Potter, the written word triumphant.”