CALGARY, Alberta -- All 300 Mac's Convenience Stores in four Canadian provinces have been denied permission to sell Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, which goes on sale July 21, reported The Globe & Mail.
"We're obviously disappointed," Mac's Calgary, Alberta-based category manager Dave Clark told the newspaper. Mac's western Canadian stores had sold the last three titles in the Harry Potter series and hoped to do so with the latest. But they have been shut out by Raincoast Books, the Vancouver-based publisher and distributor of the Harry Potter [image-nocss] series in Canada. "It was purely their decision," said Clark.
Raincoast would not confirm last week that Mac's western Canadian stores will not be taking delivery of Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows. (Mac's eastern stores have never carried Potter titles.) But Jamie Broadhurst, vice president of marketing, acknowledged that some retail outlets that were previously allowed to sell earlier Potter titles will not be doing so this time, said the report. Names of the companies were not revealed.
"We have reviewed the security procedures with all our customers, big and small," said Broadhurst, "and if we have concerns that the security of the novel can't be guaranteed, then we've made the tough decision not to ship for the on-sale date.... Security is our absolute, paramount concern."
Raincoast, along with all the other English-language Potter publishers in the world, has adopted a strict policy of secrecy in recent years prior to the publication of each novel in the series, started by British author J. K. Rowling in 1997. They say that "irreparable harm" will result should a particular novel's plot twists or climactic scenes be known in advance.
In 2005, just before the July 16 publication of the sixth novel, Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince, Raincoast got a restraining order from British Columbia's Supreme Court prohibiting "anyone who [had] directly or indirectly received [an advance] copy" of that novel from "copying or disclosing," selling or "exhibiting in public" virtually any of its contents before its on-sale date.
Raincoast claimed it was forced to get the order after at least three stores, including a Mac's in Calgary, inadvertently offered the novel for sale before July 16. As a result, Raincoast pulled whatever copies were still in these stores and only resumed shipments to them after official publication.
Raincoast's Broadhurst said security this time "is even tighter than before."
Previously, some stores would receive their Potter orders nine or 10 days in advance of publication. For Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, however, "we're working on a 'just-in-time' delivery system," he said. This means most outlets will not be getting their books until eight or 12 hours before they are permitted to be sold. It is, Broadhurst acknowledged, "a huge logistical difficulty.�
Clark said he understood Raincoast's reluctance to service the convenience stores. Previously, "getting us books four or five days before, that was asking for trouble. Someone's not going to get the message or make a mistake," as indeed happened in 2005. This time, however, Raincoast is, to his mind, working on too tight a leash, even if it means "the less number of points of distribution that they send it to, the better control they have over it."
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