Los Angeles - Days before its release, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the anticipated final novel in J.K. Rowling's series, has appeared on file-sharing networks and some websites in the form of digital photographs taken of the book's more than 700 pages.

The book's U.S. publisher, Scholastic, set about getting the various sites to remove the material in advance of the book's official release on Saturday.

"There are multiple versions of what appear to be official copies of the book on the Internet, but they are conflicting," Lisa Holton, president of trade publishing and book fairs at Scholastic, told the Los Angeles Times.

"Our goal is to take down all this different material, and by taking it down we'll never know whether any of it was real until you read it yourself on Saturday morning."

The digitized book first appeared on the BitTorrent file-sharing network, and later appeared on several websites.

Scholastic told the Times it has initiated court action against GaiaOnline.com aimed at removing Harry Potter material, and got assurances from YouTube and MySpace that they would not allow it to be posted.

In a separate incident, Scholastic has taken legal action against distributor Levy Home Entertainment and retailer DeepDiscount.com, which broke an embargo and have already shipped as many as 1,200 copies of the book to pre-order customers.

Related Links:
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-et-potter18jul18,1,1318863.story

http://www.gaiaonline.com

http://www.zendurl.com/h/hallows (Warning: spoilers)