Missing Pages, Printing Errors Hex Potter Fans

The seventh Harry Potter book sold 8.3 million copies in its first 24 hours in print, but at least 200 fans of the teenage wizard have had less than magical experiences with the saga's finale. An irate group of readers on message boards at Amazon.com and eBay are already reporting printing errors and missing pages in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

One Seattle-area muggle reported 30 pages missing from a copy of the final installment. A Scholastic spokeswoman said that "printing and distributing 12 million copies of a book is a Herculean task," requiring 288 million blocks of text to create—numbers she say put the mistakes "into perspective." (More scholastic stories.)