One worrisome trend that the author didn't really consider is that YA fiction isn't just for young adults anymore. Countless adults are reading it instead of anything else.
That said, I did enjoy reading the Harry Potter books with my kids (we read them aloud), but reading the Animorphs was not something I could really do for any length of time.
or in addition to everything else. In the last week, I've read a great young adult book as well as a Sartre novel. I consider my life enriched by both. There's this awful snobbery around young adult books, but I often find they tell the best stories. I think Philip Pullman says it best:
“There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it; cultured adults, on the other hand, those limp and jaded creatures who think it more important to seem sophisticated than to admit to simplicity, find it harder both to write and to read novels that don't come with a prophylactic garnish of irony.”
"Well, the unique thing about this period– the late 1800s and the early 1900s– was this was a time when books written for children as the main audience were largely and often read by adults and appeared on adult bestseller lists. You take a look at the bestseller lists during this period, and you see like Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pollyanna, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and maybe like War and Peace. But the great authors of the time were writing for children."
People that was going to read the good stuff anyways will find their ways there eventually.
Doesn't stop me from switching back to literature when I've had my fill.