Last night, I decided to stop at Barnes and Noble on my way home from a gaming session. I got there are 12:30 - only half an hour after they started selling the new Harry Potter book. It was completely packed - a huge line at the registers, a huge line at the cafe - and the employees calling people up to pay by ticket number. They had sold out of un-reserved copies, and were calling people up who had pre-reserved - and all this, only 30 minutes in! I asked some staff about it, and they said that they wouldn't have more copies for about a week. Someone in ordering didn't do their homework :)

So I headed to the mall this morning - my daughter had entered a contest awhile back, and entry pre-reserved a copy of the book. They were opening at 7, and I'm never up that early. I rolled in about 11:30 - the lines were long gone, but so were unreserved copies - thank goodness we had one reserved! It's massive too - 870 pages. I hope Rowling isn't startting to develop Heinlein disease... Not only the bookstores either - I had to stop at Giant for a few things, and they had been selling the book - it was sold out in 90 minutes, according the checkers. Looks to me like no one ordered enough copies of this book.