I’ve got it!! Argh! Finally! *pants* It’s… 21st July 2007! It’s here… It’s FINALLY here…! Har.. Harr.. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows! I cannot believe it! Oh…! *faints*

After the traumatic experience of watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – the movie – days ago, I am so, so, SO happy to finally have an ‘original’ Harry Potter book to enjoy!

Who’s going to die? Is Severus Snape good or bad? What/who are the remaining horcruxes? Will Ron and Hermione, Harry and Ginny get together at last? Who is R.A.B. as written on the fake Horcrux? Is Dumbledore really dead? (Sigh… Oh yes he is, J.K. Rowling confirmed it herself… *sob*)

Still, ANSWERS! I NEED ANSWERS! There are just too many questions that need to be clarified!

Anyway, before I retreat to my sweet affair with the book tonight (Aww I really have no life! Not for these few days!), let me record the astonishing event that happened today on the first day of the book’s release.

This morning, to my utter surprise – along with hundreds of thousands of Harry Potter fans in Malaysia – I saw these articles on The Star and New Straits Times.

For those of you who are not into Harry Potter, this might be a small deal; but if you’re an avid fan, and major bookstores in your country are NOT selling the final book of your idolized series, that’s one helluva big deal!

Apparently, MPH, Times, Popular and Harris Bookstores are NOT planning to sell the super anticipated book anymore because the ‘nice people’ at Tesco and Carrefour are selling at a much, much lower price!

I pre-ordered the book more than 2 months ago, and the price was announced to be RM109.90; typical HP book price, I say. True, bookstores like MPH earn substantial amounts of profit every time a Harry Potter book is released, there’s no doubt about it.

I can imagine the people in MPH or Popular eagerly estimating their upcoming profit months before the book was launched… They’d be expecting millions and millions of Ringgit… Perhaps some of the top managers were already planning what to do with the huge amount of money!

And then, all of a sudden, Tesco and Carrefour came out with this!

LOL! The manager of MPH was probably, like:

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*Reads the Carrefour newspaper ad*

*Stuns for 1 minute staring at the big ‘RM69.90‘ figure*

*Looks at his own bookstore’s ‘RM109.90‘ banner*

*Tries to say “What the…?!”*

*Vomits blood*

*Faints and dies*

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That Carrefour newspaper ad was like an Avada Kedavra sent straight into the Bookstores’ chest, instant kill!

I must say, I couldn’t agree fully with what Carrefour and Tesco are doing. Although it is a competitive business – the lowest price gets the highest demand – but still, hypermarkets can afford to sell the book at unprofitable prices because they have many, many other goods to compensate!

Once you go to Tesco or Carrefour to buy the book, you’ll probably end up buying something else too! But what about the other chain bookstores? You don’t go to MPH to buy Harry Potter and end up buying a whole bunch of other books you didn’t intend to buy, do you?

When I went to MPH in 1 Utama today, I saw the newspaper cuttings of The Star and New Straits Times pasted on the wall announcing the bad news.

For us who pre-ordered the book, we were generously given a choice to either proceed with purchasing the book at RM109.90, or have our deposit of RM70 refunded (now that some people might wanna buy in Tesco instead).

It may not be the wisest thing to do, but without hesitation I chose to buy the book at the original price. First, because I wanted to start reading the book tonight and didn’t wanna waste time going to Tesco or Carrefour, furthermore risk having the ‘cheaper’ books sold out.

Second, I pride to have the RM109.90 price sticker by MPH Bookstores on the back cover of my book. With all due respect to the hypermarts, A Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows book with a RM69.90 price sticker (if any) by a hypermarket seems pretty ‘cheap’ to me. (None of the previous hard-covered HP books were that low-priced.)

However, I’m not sure if the act of the major bookstores ‘not selling’ the book nationwide, is really the best way to solve this problem… Yes, Penguin Books (the HP book distributor) might be pressured to stop distributing to the hypermarkets, but what about the fans?

A huge amount of fans have waited passionately for this day to come, they’ve waited for years, and not pre-ordering the book doesn’t mean they’re any less real fans or eager to read the book.

I can imagine how devastated I would be if I were one of them, when I eagerly walked into a a bookstore on the very first day, excitedly hoping to buy the book, only to be told that they’ve decided not to sell it! Damn!

And not to mention that Carrefour and Tesco are not everywhere in the country! Some small towns don’t have them! What about the fans living there? =( They must be really sad and disappointed…

I really hope that the parties involved in this issue could come up with a decent solution real soon. Yes, I know this is business, and business is about profiting; but while considering options to settle this, please try not to choose a way that’s done at the expense of the fans, they really don’t deserve it…

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Sad news away, I gotta start reading the book! Oh I’ve used up too much time on this entry. So, see ya! I’ll review the book when I’m finished with it later!

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