Publishers battling Potter spoilers

JK Rowling is to reveal Harry Potter's fate this weekend

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Spoilers are spreading on the internet just days before the world learns whether Harry Potter lives or dies.

Scanned pages of what may be the entire text of the final instalment of JK Rowling's series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, were circulating among web users.

A separate link - http://www.zendurl.com/h/hallows - displayed what the site claimed to be a seven-page epilogue and the table of contents from Deathly Hallows, which is coming out on Saturday amid tight security.

Similar information - on http://spoilerboy.googlepages.com/home - appeared on Monday.

Meanwhile, a resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, claimed to have downloaded hundreds of pages from the 784-page book. US publisher Scholastic said it had been busy ordering would-be spoilers to remove their information from the internet.

"I'm guessing we're in the double digits," said Scholastic spokeswoman Kyle Good, who added that requiring material to be pulled down did not mean it was authentic.

"There's so much out there that it's confusing for fans. Our lawyers are trying to keep down the amount of spoiler traffic that's out there and clear it from places where fans might be reading."

Anxious about keeping a lock on publishing's ultimate mystery, Scholastic has refused all along to say whether a spoiler has the real book or not.

According to Good, there is more than one version of the full Potter text on the internet. She said the different versions all "looked convincing" and all had different content from each other.

Author JK Rowling, who has said two major characters will die, has begged the public not to give away the ending to her seventh and final Potter book.

Fan sites such as http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/ and http://www.mugglenet.com have vowed to keep spoilers away.