• Los Angeles Times, Thursday, July 19, 2007 11:15 AM

The final installment of the Harry Potter series is scheduled to come out Saturday morning at 12:01 a.m., but news of the book's content is already spreading across the Web. On Tuesday, digital photographs of pages from the 700-plus-page novel "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" appeared on various Web sites, threatening the "specialness" of the series' resolution to millions of fans across the globe.

What followed was mass confusion: Is it real? U.S. publisher Scholastic says the versions on the Web conflict with the actual text. Who did it? The U.K. and U.S. publishers have been left wondering who to sue. Author J.K. Rowling galvanized brave Potter fans to take a vow of celibacy regarding the leak by writing an online letter; thousands agreed to stay away from Potter blogs and other potential spoiling grounds until they've been united with the final book.

Indeed, it's a conundrum for publishers of any kind: how do you make a release special when distributors can easily leak a product's contents to the Web? File-sharing sites did their part to circulate the Potter book, but highly trafficked blogs like Gawker and Salon linking to the material does even more damage.

Read the whole story at Los Angeles Times »