Not the whole story

At least 200 people across the country who bought "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" over the weekend could use a little wizardry to help them get through the book.

And it's not because the final installment of the series about a boy wizard, Muggles and Hogwarts is too long.

The books, first made available Saturday, have printing errors that include missing pages. At least three QFC stores in the Renton/Maple Valley area had problems, with one book missing at least 30 pages.

Kristin Maas, a QFC spokeswoman, said the grocery chain has made calls to Scholastic Inc., the U.S. publishing company that sold 8.3 million "Deathly Hallows" books in the first 24 hours, and will replace any books with errors. Maas did not know how many books had problems.

"Printing and distributing 12 million copies of a book is a Herculean task, and it is not surprising at all that some would have printing errors," Scholastic said in a statement Monday morning.

Scholastic initially said it had just 21 books with errors, but that number had increased to 200 by early afternoon.

Sara Sinek, a Scholastic spokeswoman, said the errors were reported in different parts of the U.S., and the company expected to have a few problems because the seventh "Harry Potter" book, at 759 pages, had such a massive run.

Sinek said it took 288 million blocks of text or sections to create 12 million books.

"That puts into perspective the huge quantity we are talking about," Sinek said.

The problems, however, could be growing.

A handful of readers on message boards at Amazon.com and eBay voiced complaints Monday over missing pages, and the BBC reported that a batch of books in Australia and New Zealand had two chapters gone.