Whoops, looks like a store near Vancouver mistakenly sold some copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince over a week before its July 16 release! According to Reuters:
Raincoast Books Ltd., which distributes the books in Canada, said a “small number” of the books were sold, and it has won a court injunction barring the buyers of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” from disclosing the plot.
I wonder how such a thing could be enforced. I suppose blogging could be blocked through some legal mechanism or other, but would the buyers be barred from e-mailing story details to their friends, or even from sharing such details in conversation?
The court also ordered all the copies be returned to Raincoast, which has promised the early buyers book plates autographed by Rowling once the embargo is lifted.
I wouldn’t want to be bossed around by the courts, myself — especially if I had bought the book in good faith (and had already started making notes in the margins!) — but hey, if I were one of these people, I’d much rather have an actual autographed book plate than a story, about buying the book before anyone else did, that people would only be able to accept on my say-so.
JUL 12 UPDATE: Today’s Vancouver Sun has more details.
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