I’ve certainly hoped that J.K. Rowling’s influence on children will be profound: Because they’ve found books they love, they’ll continue to read more and more, constantly searching for similar reading experiences. But today’s NY Times article by Motoko Rich questions this hope.

Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.

There is no doubt that the books have been a publishing sensation. In the 10 years since the first one, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” was published, the series has sold 325 million copies worldwide, with 121.5 million in print in the United States alone. Before Harry Potter, it was virtually unheard of for kids to queue up for a mere book. Children who had previously read short chapter books were suddenly plowing through more than 700 pages in a matter of days.

Then these children age. They develop other passions, especially those driven by hormones. They begin moving out of a home where they read books into the larger society of middle and high school where they make friends and begin to deal with social, media and sexual demands that become more important than the world of books.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of federal tests administered every few years to a sample of students in grades 4, 8 and 12, the percentage of kids who said they read for fun almost every day dropped from 43 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade in 1998, the year “Sorcerer’s Stone” was published in the United States. In 2005, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth book, was published, the results were identical.

. . .

But creating a habit of reading is a continuous battle with kids who are saturated with other options. During a recent sixth-grade English class at the John W. McCormack Middle School in the Dorchester section of Boston, Aaron Forde, a cherubic 12-year-old, said he loved playing soccer, basketball and football. On top of that, he spends four hours a day chatting with friends on MySpace.com, the social networking site.

Of course it’s a continuous battle, and we shouldn’t lose hope because children go through a period when they read less. My guess is that these same children, when the NY Times checks back with them during college and after, will have matured in their relationships with others and in their own identities, will have begun to figure out what they’re going to do during the next decade or two, and will look back fondly on the Potter series as an introduction to their connection with books and literature.

And while it’s probably true that the emphasis during these middle years should be more on nonfiction than fiction because life’s lessons are more easily understood as fact rather than literature . . .

Some reading experts say that urging kids to read fiction in general might be a misplaced goal. “If you look at what most people need to read for their occupation, it’s zero narrative,” said Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford University. “I don’t want to deny that you should be reading stories and literature. But we’ve overemphasized it,” he said. Instead, children need to learn to read for information, Mr. Kamil said, something they can practice while reading on the Internet, for example.

. . . ultimately there’s a good chance that one who once loved a novel is much more likely later in life to return to that quest for something just as good and something that speaks to that person now as Potter did when he was a child.

Still, there is something about seeing the passion that a novel can inspire that excites those who want to perpetuate a culture of reading. Even as the Harry Potter series draws to a close, there are signs that other books are coming up to take its place.

On a recent afternoon at at Public School 54 on Staten Island, a group of fifth grade boys shouted with enthusiasm for the “Cirque du Freak” series by Darren Shan, about a boy who becomes entangled with a vampire.

“I like the books so much that even when the teacher is teaching a lesson, I still want to read the books,” said Vincent Eng, a wiry 11-year-old. His classmate Thejas Alex said he had stopped reading a Harry Potter book to jump into “Cirque du Freak.”

“While I was reading them,” Thejas said, referring to the “Cirque” books, “I was like, addicted.”