Web goes Potter potty

ONLINE BOOKSHOP, AMAZON said the Interweb had gone potty over Harry Potter, with close to 1.6 million copies of the upcoming final instalment having been snapped up long before the launch date.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is released on July 21st and is the subject of much wired chatter.

A hacker claimed to have unearthed secrets from the plot, by sneaking into publisher Bloomsbury's networks. Bloomsbury deemed the claims unworthy of comment.

Also doing the rounds is a file purporting to be a copy of the book in .doc format. Unleashed, the attached Hairy-A worm hops between drives and USB sticks creating new users such as Ron Weasley and Hermione Grainger.

The number of preorders for the book at Amazon surpasses the 1.5 million record set by the previous book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

So far, the six Harry Potter books have sold around 325 million copies worldwide. µ