Ok, I spent extra money…
I ordered 3 from Amazon.com (2 were being shipped to my niece and to my mother). I got the email yesterday that they had shipped. I woke up early today and decided I wanted to read the book NOW!!!
I drove to Target and picked up a copy at 8:00. My ordered book arrived at about 1:30 and I guess I’ll leave it in the box. I just finished the book.
Tell everybody what – when my second copy arrives, if somebody here hasn’t gotten it but wants it, I’ll pass the one I have now on to them. All I ask is that you pay shipping, which I can guarantee you is less than the book at a store!
The book came out at 9am here. Mr P and I had an animated discussion about buying it – it seems all the people I was planning to bum it off are not buying it :(. I pointed out it was a tax deduction after all. The day I realised every single book we buy is a tax deduction was a sad day for my credit card.
Went to Target. It was on a shelf near the checkout. After deciding it was cheap enough, I queued and queued and queued as for some reason the checkout operator didn’t seem to know how to use her till. This gave me the opportunity to find American JellyBelly jellybeans which are made with corn glucose instead of wheat glucose which made P the Younger very happy indeed.
It was indeed a dull purchase. There were a lot of indie stores doing promotions but effectively you were paying $19 for the pleasure as Target had discounted so steeply.
I decided a little late that I wanted to get the new book RIGHT AWAY. Originally, I had planned to wait a bit to read it…but then, I started getting worried that someone would accidentally or intentionally spoil it for me. In fact, someone on another message board that I visit (shame on me) already tried to spoil the book.
Around noon today I started phoning book stores to see if there were copies (not the $60 copies) in stock. I was really lucky. The first store I called had a couple of copies behind the counter. The book store was near my mom’s office so I called her and had her run over to pick it up. I am now the proud owner of the new Harry Potter Book which I anticipate to finish reading in the next few days. Never could put those books down!
I just paid $15 for it at Costco. Walked in at 2ish, there were probably 500 copies on a pallette, and I grabbed one.
We went to Barnes and Noble last night - a friend’s 8 YO niece is in town, so we just had to go along with them.
It was ok - I didn’t buy the book last night, as I have to finish two papers before I can even consider it (though I have scrounged the funds for it). I’ll go to WalMart when I finish the papers. If it’s Monday afternoon, then it’s Monday afternoon. I’m actually pretty proud of myself for not breaking down and buying it, as I’m entirely too good at justification.
Best costumes spotted: one kid with his hair dyed red and a large F stapled onto his sweater, and a guy wearing a nightgown with a “GO IRELAND!” button on. 
Picked it up this morning from Borders. No pre-order or anything. The seven people in line in front of me also bought a copy.
I’ve already finished reading it.
Can anyone answer the question of why this book is listed as having 896 pages, and yet there are 870 pages in my copy?
I got it at Ralph’s. 40% off if you had a club card, and, free with purchase, a six-pack of Coke, Diet Coke or Sprite, and a bag of Nabisco Mini’s! Not products I’d normally buy (I’m a Pepsi addict, sue me), but hey, free is free!
I’ve finished chapter 1. Who_me?, you are kidding. You finished it that fast?
Iteki, the same thing would have happened to me, if I hadn’t finally had to accept the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to keep $20 in my account until the release date. So I cancelled the order. Amazon doesn’t take your money until they ship the product: normally an admirable policy, but this was one time when I would have preferred to pay in advance to get it over with.
gobear: The “party” atmosphere, I guess. For book 4, I went to Borders with Griselda, my witch doll. We had a great time talking to the wee ones and watching a magic show. But if I’d gone to B&N in my own community, I might have gotten on TV; there was a local news crew there! I went the Amazon route (well, tried, anyway) this time because I’d BTDT. God bless Mr. Rilch for financing my Ralph’s expedition!
I walked in, picked it up, bought it, thought “Gee, that’s absurdly expensive” and then left. I am about a third of the way through.
People who can read a book like this in less than 12 hours I think suck a lot of the fun out of reading.
Heh: I’m taking advantage of Barnes n Noble’s generous in store reading policy. I got to page 330 in a few hours of reading before I had to head home. Pretty good, though Rowling’s habit of vaguely hinting at mysteries and then dragging things out before revealing even tidbits makes it at the same time both hard to put down and exhausting.
I did, however, first have to find a B&N that actually had the book out to pick up from shelves prior to purchase: the first one had it only on display and for sale behind a counter.
This things is HUGE too. How are little kids supposed to lug this thing around? It would probably break the wrists of a seven year old trying to hold it up to read.
Went to Borders at 8, picked up a ticket, had dinner, saw a movie, went back to Borders at 11:30, ran into Judith Prietht (who was also there for the book), stood in line with her and bored her with lame jokes, got farted at by the guy in line in front of us, bought the book and read it aloud in the car on the way home. We’re only a fifth into it because my son and I read a chapter each night together, and he’s already mad at me for starting without him.
GuanoLad, some of us are just natural speed readers, too. I normally do about a book a day. This is a long one, and I’ve been taking breaks, but I’m still expecting to have it finished sometime tomorrow morning.
And I AM having fun. I LOVE to read.
We’re reading it slowly, aloud, as has been our tradition for all of the Harry Potter books so far. I started reading them aloud to the family with the first one, and it’s just stuck. We usually take our time about it.
It’s pretty good, so far.
I added my name two months ago to a list at a local bookstore that I’ll identify only as
WALDEN BOOKS
Hatcher Square Mall
Milledgeville, GA 31061
(478) 452-5600
the only bookstore in my town. I went in to the mall this evening to pick up the copy and was informed “Oh, sorry… we’re already sold out.”
But I was on a list, says I.
“Well, so were 250 other people, and we only had 200 copies.”
Then why were there 250 people on the list, ask I.
“We didn’t think that many people would come in and claim it.”
Well, that’s understandable, not like it’s a publishing phenomenon or anything.
So quite p.o.d, not so much as being delayed because I hadn’t planned to read it tonight anyway as at the dying art of customer service, I went out to do my grocery shopping. There were several dozen on the table at the Kroger’s where I went, all of them 40% instead of the full-price at the bookstore where I’ll never shop again. Got one of those, some pesto, pasta, and cigarettes and called it a day.
Not much of a story here. Went to B&N this morning and they had a table stacked high with copies right inside the door. There was no line. I was in and out in less than five minutes. I’ve only read a couple of chapters but I’ll be digging seriously into it any minute now.
It was a nightmare. Fortunately, the doctor says it’s just a bad sprain, and that I’ll be able to walk on it okay by Monday. The wife’s a little battered – she must have intercepted about a hundred elbows at one point – and my daughter’s okay. Turns out she won’t need stitches after all.
You know, if one is going to publicize and advertise and wave the flag to get a thousand people into a bookstore to buy a book…
…one should make sure the store will hold a thousand people.
…one should make sure all the registers are working.
…one should have EVERY goddamn employee there and on call.
…one should have some sort of plan for how one is going to distribute the books to this thousand people, particularly the ones who reserved copies ahead of time.
…and most importantly… one should have plenty of books. As opposed to less than 300.
Having them all wait around for several hours before you give them any information about where to line up doesn’t help. It’s even worse when you tell them to go line up in one place, and it turns out there’s not enough room, and then you tell them to go line up somewhere else. By the time they were ready to distribute the books, the mood wasn’t good. It didn’t help that someone had leaked the fact that they didn’t have very many copies for sale, either… in the middle of the party.
Miracle the fire department didn’t close the place down. Then again, they didn’t have time. After the riot started, the cops dispersed everyone, and by the time things died down, the place was well under its minimum legal capacity.
We did get two copies, though. As well as a stubbed toe, a black eye, a constellation of bruises, one rather long shallow scratch, and a nastily sprained ankle. And there’s some question as to whether or not I’m going to have to pay for the display I destroyed. At one point, I had to climb on top of a stack of Stephen King hardbacks and hold the little wizardy sonsabitches off. There was a metal rack of collector bookmarks handy; I found that once I picked it up and shook all the bookmarks out, it made a fine long bludgeon, handy for knocking the little bastards off the display when they got cheeky. MY books, you poisonous little costumed turds! MINE!
I was doing FINE until someone’s mother realized that they could unbalance me by simply yanking one of the bottom copies of Stephen King out of the stack… goddamn avalanche. Hell, they ought to make HER pay for those books. I didn’t hurt them until I slid down the pile on my ass. And nobody said boo to that guy who pitched the magazine display through the plate glass window to get his children to safety. I KNOW that has to be more expensive than a stack of five-year-old Dark Tower books.
Hmmph. Cops said it’s because HE was trying to ESCAPE, to get his family to safety. Well, so was I! My family was already outside, but I was cut off… and I had the Harry Potter books! If the little shits had left me ALONE for ten seconds, I was TRYING to get to the top of the stacks! From there, I could have made it into the suspended ceiling, and from there to safety!
But NO, the little monsters kept trying to get the BOOKS away from me, and forced me to defend myself and my property. And did their mothers stop them? HELL, no! They were standing at the back, DIRECTING STRATEGY, sending the little bastards at me in WAVES! “Tommy and Unit Bravo, cut left and flank him while that kid in the pointy hat immobilizes his ankle! Watch that bookmark rack!”
Bastards.
And no one’s even pressing CHARGES against the guy who set off the sprinkler systems. They say he was a hero, for not only dispersing the crowd and getting them outside, but for putting out the fires as well. Uh-huh. Ruined a million bucks worth of books, too, but nobody’s asking HIM to pay for it all.
Good thing mine were already in a plastic bag by then. When they finally dug me out of the burning rubble, the books were in terrific shape.
Ah, well.
At least I have something to read while I convalesce…
Oh, no, wait, I’m lying through my teeth.
They DID have enough copies, oddly enough, although it was a near thing. The crowd DID get kind of ugly at one point – being told to shuffle from one part of the store to the other naturally resulted in lost places in line, and some people weren’t happy about it, especially when told to go shuffle someplace else because there wasn’t enough room in the place they’d been told to shuffle to at first.
Then a register died, and they started shunting people to one of the other registers. Without informing the crowd of what was going on. When a guy just wandered up and cut into an existing line, it began to look like things MIGHT get out of hand for a minute, until the book manager – sweet li’l thing in a witch outfit, looked like she might have been all of twenty – cooled the crowd off by explaining the situation. In a trembling voice. It’s hard to get mad at someone who’s obviously in WAY over their head, and utterly terrified.
Shortly thereafter, the cops showed up. No one got out of hand. No property was damaged. Dunno about stolen, though – the wife and I discussed about how if one wished to shoplift half the world out the front door, you could hardly pick a better time than when there’s a zillion people jammed in there, the employees all wish they could fly or clone themselves, and it’s perfectly all right for grown people to wear huge black cloaks and hats you could hide a birthday cake inside.
It was actually pretty fun, though… until about eleven-thirty. That’s when things began to get weird, and they didn’t much cool off until an hour later, when the lines really got moving, and it began to look like everyone was going to get a book.
We actually hung around outside for quite a while, just to see if all hell was going to break loose if and when they ran out. They didn’t run out.
We didn’t feel quite brave or motivated enough to go back this morning, though…
I don’t know about B&N, but Borders is selling the book for 40% off. Although at my store, we got in 1180 copies and 1000+ were already reserved, so I’m not sure if there are any ‘free’ ones out there. I do know our RM wants us to start pulling the reserves as early as tommorrow after 6pm. Her theory is most people will pick it up at Kroger/Walmart/etc, and not the place where they reserved it. Go Figure.
I slept.
I’ve never read the first four, and so have no desire to read the fifth one.
Hope you weren’t too groggy this morning. 
For what it’s worth, this is a fairly common thing. Actually, it’s how I got my PS2 way back on launch day.
Basically, I started a preorder months and months before. The cool part about this place’s system was that you got the preorder with five dollars and could add money in any amount at any time to the preorder, all the way up to the complete cost of the system (including tax.) Come the day you could pick it up, you either get it right then or pay the remaining difference. (This is pretty smart policy on the part of the store when you think about it.)
Now, if you might remember, the launch of the PS2 was a pretty big event. I had not gotten my preorder in early enough for the first shipment, however I was early enough to be very early in the second shipment. As time went on, I added more and more money, to the point where I had the entire system prepaid. Because of the trouble on the part of Sony meeting demand, the local store decided to give first priority to anyone, regardless of where they were in the shipment order, who had the entire thing paid off. So, that’s how I got a PS2 on launch day.
Also, Waldenbooks is a chain. I don’t know how related the individual stores in the chain are (I mean, is it a franchise operation or controlled higher-up corporately), but there are several chains where a preorder in one store can be picked up in any other store (assuming, of course, they have a copy there.) I was told this was the policy of the Musicland Group (who did Best Buy sell this to, anyway?) the other day at a Suncoast. So, it is generally reasonable, in my opinion, to believe that all the people who preorder will not all come in the day of release. That’s generally why these preorders and such have relatively generous holding periods.