BRITAIN:It has one of the strictest embargoes, and perhaps the tightest security, of any book in publishing history. But only days before publication of the new Harry Potter novel its publishers yesterday were engaged in a desperate battle to suppress a number of websites after alleged extracts appeared on the internet.
Digital photos of pages of a book purporting to be Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final volume in JK Rowling's enormously popular series, have been appearing on websites.
Online filesharing networks were also offering downloadable files claiming to contain the full text of the novel, which will be launched in Britain and most of the English-speaking world at midnight tomorrow.
Scholastic, the publishing house which owns the US rights, said it was seeking to remove the spoilers from the sites.
"There are multiple versions of what appear to be official copies of the book on the internet, but they are conflicting," publisher Lisa Holton said.
The firm said it had persuaded YouTube and MySpace not to carry extracts. It has initiated proceedings against another website, gaiaonline.com, for publishing material relating to the book.
If the extracts are genuine it will be one of the most serious security lapses since the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published 10 years ago.
Books have been kept in guarded warehouses and delivered by vans tracked by satellites. Clays, printer of the British edition, installed barbed wire around its Suffolk plant and hired extra guards to search workers as they left the factory. A spokeswoman for Bloomsbury, which owns the English language rights outside the US, said only one employee, JK Rowling's editor Emma Matthewson, had read the manuscript.
The author herself made an impassioned plea against the "sad individuals who get their kicks from ruining other people's fun. I want the readers who have, in many instances, grown up with Harry to embark on the last adventure they will share with him without knowing where they are going."