As I watched my youngest son zip through reading all seven volumes of the Harry Potter series last year, it struck me how different his reading experience was from my two older children.

He could sit down and consume it all in one gulp. My older children had to wait for the last four volumes to be published.

And that made a huge difference in how they perceived the story.

Our household first got into reading Harry Potter when my eldest daughter's second grade teacher read it to her in class. She'd been uninterested before (probably because it didn't have horses or had a female lead character) but she was hooked from then on. At that time, the first three books were available, so she literally absorbed those in a quick gulp and started looking for more.

Except *she *had to wait.

Granted, not as long as the rest of the world, because it was halfway between the publication of *Prisoner of Azkaban *and Goblet of Fire but, to her, it seemed to take forever. That ending was a killer, of course, and then we faced the long wait for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

By this point, my daughter had passed on the books to her younger brother, who loved them just as much. Since they had to wait, they did what voracious readers with imagination do: they tried to guess what would happen next.

What characters might die next? Where the rumors of many deaths in Phoenix just rumors? And who would hook up with who next? Were Ron and Hermione really going to be a couple? How much strength did Voldemort have? Was Snape trustworthy or not?

And so on and so on. They drove me nuts with all the questions and scenarioses. Eventually, they went on-line and starting frequenting discussion boards and reading Harry Potter fanfiction.

My biggest mistake through all this was to order only one copy of Half-Blood Prince for the house the summer it was released. Bad mom, very bad.

The book arrived on the doorstep. My daughter snagged it and ran around to the back door to hide it from her brother. She didn't want him to even see it before she finished reading. Sharing was not in her plans.

Unfortunately, in her haste, she fumbled with the back door lock, broke a window pane and sliced her hand. Still, he refused to let the book go while I bandaged her up. (Thankfully, she did not need stitches. More important to her, the book stayed bloodstain free.)

Lesson learned. I ordered two copies of Deathly Hallows.

Their obsession was at a fever pitch while waiting for that last volume. Would Harry die? Ron? Hermione? Neville? Would the question of why Dumbledore was such a careless guardian be answered? Did Harry really care about Ginny or was it hormones? And they (like the rest of fandom) were definitely divided over the 'ships. Much angst was spilled over Ron and Hermione, of course, as well as Harry and Ginny, and Luna and whatever boy or girl was their favorite of the week.

I wondered if there was anything J.K. Rowling could do to surprise anyone with the ending. It inevitably had to end with a wizard duel between Harry and Voldemort. What could she do beyond that? It seemed she'd written herself into a corner.

The last books arrived. I didn't seem the older two for a couple of days, save for grunts and the occasional meal.

They breathed a heavy sigh of happiness when finished. I agreed that it was a fantastic ending though we had a divided opinion about the epilogue. I thought it fine. The eldest wrinkled her nose still at Ron and Hermione. (As did our own Jennifer Day.)

Then they promptly re-read the whole series to catch all the little pieces and hints that had added up to the conclusion.

And that's the way new readers will experience the books from now on, as one long continuous whole.

Unlike the generation that grew up on the books, there's no waiting period, no period of speculation and anticipation. It's all there.

The words and story inside the books remain the same. But the experience is so very different. New readers can jump from one volume to the next with no break. They won't have time to develop the expectations those who waited for the books to be published did. The story will just flow for them, without all the imagined possibilities. And they won't grow up along with Harry, either.

And it does make it a different story.

I don't think that's a bad thing for future readers of Harry Potter. There's something awesome about devouring such a huge volume of story in one gulp. I well remember how I absorbed all of the Lord of the Rings one summer or found the complete saga of Tarzan or the entire Sherlock Holmes Canon.

But I can't help thinking that my older two children and their generation were the lucky ones.

Harry Potter belongs to them as he never will to any others.