I have done a little research on Harry Potter. All 7 books take up 6 megabytes. One source says they are 4,195 pages. So what can kids learn from all of that reading?

I have the books in electronic form and did searches. But I compared it to two sets of science fiction anthologies of public domain SF. One collection is made up of 150 short stories and the other is 17 long works and both are a little over 6 megabytes just like the Harry Potter series.

The HP books use a total of FIVE "ology" words.

astrology 1
heptomology 1
herbology 47
numerology 3
psy­chology 1

Herbology was used much more than the others. Heptomology Is the study of diseases of the liver. Only a minority of a minority of readers that become involved in medicine would use that word much. Astrology and numerology must certainly have high priorities in a computerized society. The results for the olde science fiction was quite different. All of the works are more than 46 years old. But how much should most grade school kids learn about science that was not known in the early 60s.

.................short.long

Anthropology........4
archaeology.........9
bacteriology........1.....1
biology.............7....11
criminology.........1
culturology.........2
demonology..........1
ecology.............9.....5
Egyptology..........2
entomology..........0.....2
geology.............1.....2
horology............0.....1
ideology............5.....1
meteorology.........2
morphology..........0.....2
mythology...........4.....1
Neurology...........3
paleontology........1
Parapsychology.....10
parasitology........0.....1
penology............0.....1
Petrology...........1
physiology..........5.....3
psychology.........28....25
psychopathology.....1
Psychophysiology....1
sociology...........1.....2
symbology...........1
technology.........35....29
topology............0.....1
zoology.............3.....1

The short stories used 24 "ology" words and the novels used 18. A number of useful words are common to both collections. Psychology is used more than 20 times in each of the sci-fi collections but only once by J. K. Rowling. Technology is used even more often. Biology, ecology and physiology are the next most common. So any readers should encounter many more ideas relating to those words than they would get from Harry Potter.

Astronomy and telescope are used more than 20 times each in Harry Potter but it is mostly about the "Astronomy Tower" and students taking telescopes to class but the words, orbit, gravity and physics are never used so the words are nothing but props in the story showing that the characters are at a school. The reader can't actually learn anything as a result of using the time being entertained.

The trouble with the cyber-public domain is that there are more than 1000 science fiction works on the net. So even if it only takes one minute to download each that would still amount to almost 17 hours of work. At $7 minimum wage that would cost over $100 and would leave no time for evaluating what the stories were about or how good they were. A Harry Potter box set can cost from $50 to $200 depending on paperback or hard cover and quality of box and the seller. So in a way downloading can cost much less for the amount of material and now computers and e-readers can be had for about $100.

$100 Sylvania

I bought one of those. In many ways it is sub-standard. But it is all a matter of what you choose to do with it. It can play videos off the Internet wirelessly. It can work as a book reader for all of that science fiction. It has a good enough keyboard for typing lots of short works, much better than the OLPC. So as a POTENTIAL learning tool it is as good as much more expensive and capable machines. And it is lighter than most of those devices. So it ain't the technology. It is what you do with it.

Google:

science fiction anthology sd card

Read or listen to science fiction All Day.

Science via science fiction is for kids.