Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

Officially the final installment of the Harry Potter book series "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," hasn't been released, yet some companies under an agreement to wait for the opening on July 21 to release to the book, have broken the agreement and allowed books to go out.

What's happened is spoilers are already online, which takes some of the excitement and edge off of the release.

In response, Scholastic has filed a lawsuit against two companies: DeepDiscount.com and Levy Home Entertainment

With the strong temptation to release the book before the scheduled date, was there anything else that could have been done by management of Scholastic to make this work better?

This is one case where the company had to understand that this wasn't going to be business as usual. With the book series being one of the most popular in history, to think the final book of the series wouldn't need special attention wouldn't be wise.

On the other hand, this book will sell whether this had happened or not. Look at the number of people who will ruin the ending for themselves by reading the ending of the book before they even start the first chapter. Even with that in mind they still sell it.

Even with the knowledge that it would be difficult to keep the book from going out, there probably wasn't much more the company could do. Even if someone at a book store took it out of the box and read the ending, they could have put that up online without ever sending the book out.

When considering this, the only thing I could think of would be holding the book back from the stores and distributors until the last minute of release. Of course that would have created a lot of problems because it would have created a shortage that would have enraged fans.

In the end, I don't think there was much else the company could do. All they can do now is create some confusion on the ending in the marketplace so most fans don't know which ending put up on the Internet is the real one; something they seem to have already done.

Probably the best thing they could do was what they already did, which was to sue those that broke the agreement. That's about all that's left to manage, as they don't want other distributors thinking in the future they can do the same thing and get away with it.