Ripley's novel, with its answer to a decades-old tease - whether Scarlett and Rhett end up together - was a guaranteed, instant best seller, an object of fascination awaited by millions. And it deserved the fullest first printing that the market could handle in 1991, 500,000 copies.

''It made sense at that level,'' says Kirshbaum, now a literary agent, who added that printing any more books right away would have been ''unreasonable.''

The rollout for the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, makes the fuss for Scarlett look primitive. Potter's first printing was 12 million. Its sales after the first hour exceeded the first printing of Scarlett. After 24 hours, worldwide sales had topped 10 million, with 8.3 million in the United States alone.

But the numbers do more than capture the special appeal of Deathly Hallows: They reflect how the market has changed. Production and communication systems were far slower at the time of Scarlett, Amazon.com did not exist, superstores were only getting started and price clubs weren't selling nearly as many books as they are now.

No book before Deathly Hallows sold so quickly. No book could have.

''With Potter, you have almost a perfect storm of events,'' says Steve Ross, president and publisher of Collins, a division of HarperCollins. ''You have changes in technology and capacity, the synergy that worked so effectively between the books and the movies, and, most importantly, . . . they were books of startling quality.''

''I surely would hesitate before trying to do something like 12 million copies for Dan Brown's next book, but thanks largely to Potter, we can think about numbers we wouldn't have imagined before,'' says Stephen Rubin, president and publisher of the Broadway Doubleday Publishing Group, which released the mega-selling The Da Vinci Code.

Creating Potter demand was easy; a brief announcement of the release date, July 21, immediately sent Deathly Hallows to the top of best-seller lists. Supply was the challenge, coordinated in the United States by a trio at Scholastic Inc. who worked together on the last four Potter books - Ed Swart, director of operations and distribution; Andy Yablin, vice president of global logistics; and Francine Colaneri, vice president of manufacturing and corporate purchasing.

The release of Deathly Hallows was a timed worldwide gala, with the guest of honor embargoed until 12:01 a.m. Scholastic's planning began at least a year ago, even before Rowling had finished the book.

Scholastic benefited from technology that didn't exist in the 1990s. E-mail meant that lengthy, complex documents could be transmitted instantly.

Satellite tracking allowed the publisher to know the exact location of every delivery truck.

Book production was accelerated, Colaneri says. Before Potter, lengthy hardcovers had to pass through binding equipment twice and then were joined together. Starting with the fifth Potter manufacturers altered their presses to allow the entire text through at one time.

Since the first Potter book came out, in 1997, every aspect of the business - from shipments to retailing - has consolidated and expanded. Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble each received more than 1 million pre-orders, unimaginable a decade ago. There are fewer (but larger) printing companies, truck carriers and wholesalers.

A decade ago, the maximum first printing for a hardcover would have been about 1 million or 2 million, for a new John Grisham or Stephen King, says Laurie Brown, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Harcourt. Each new Potter effectively raised the roof - from 3.8 million copies for Book 4 to 10.8 million for Book 6,