TORONTO — The clock is ticking on the hotly anticipated release of the final "Harry Potter'' book, so it's no surprise that conspiracy theorists, fans angry about supposed plot spoilers and paranoid bookies are out in full force.

By late Tuesday every page of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'' was reported to be circulating online, a potential deathblow to the spectacular security measures that have surrounded the book.

"This is about as exciting as I've ever seen it in the world of books,'' Ben McNally, a longtime Toronto bookseller and owner of Ben McNally Books, said Tuesday. "The fact that it involves young people is pretty thrilling to my old flinty heart, believe me.''

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'' arrives in bookstores at 12:01 a.m. on July 21, and that's when the frenzied speculation about the ending of the most successful series of books in literary history should finally cease. J. K. Rowling says she's killed off two major characters in "Deathly Hallows,'' effectively sparking the most feverish episode of Potter-mania in the 10-year history of the books.

Reports of security breaches have become a daily occurrence in recent days.

Raincoast Books in Canada and Scholastic Inc., the book's American publisher, have also taken unprecedented security measures to make sure none of the millions of copies from the initial printing leak out before Friday.

Raincoast put out a plea on Monday, urging anyone claiming to know what happens at the end of "Deathly Hallows'' keep it to themselves so as not to ruin the surprise for Potter fans who prefer to actually read the book and find out who dies. The appeal came as a Vancouver man claimed he'd downloaded photographs of the "Deathly Hallows'' pages from a European file-sharing website.

Byron Ng is just one of many who say they've found the manuscript and know the ending -- although very few seem to have seen the same ending, suggesting there have been deliberate red herrings leaked to websites or planted on the Internet by a savvy Bloomsbury.

On Tuesday the ante went up even higher with word that photographs of the entire text of the book could be found on the Internet.

A record two million people worldwide have already pre-ordered "Deathly Hallows'' from Amazon, and millions more books are expected to sell within the first 24 hours of its release to shatter previous Potter records.

Even drug-dealers have jumped on the Harry Potter bandwagon, allegedly attempting to peddle ecstasy tablets bearing Harry Potter's distinctive lightning-bolt initials. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, N.Y., charged 14 people this week with smuggling 400,000 pills of the popular party drug into the U.S. from Europe, some of them emblazoned with HP.

Some fans, already grieving the end of the series, could apparently use some happy pills.

Facebook, the popular social networking site, is home to dozens of Harry Potter groups, but none quite so depressingly named as "After Harry Potter Seven Comes Out I Won't Have Anything To Live For.''

With more than 62,000 members worldwide, it's described by its administrator as a group "for all those who have waited year after year for the next Harry Potter book to come out, and feel that after book seven comes out their life will no longer have meaning.''

Some of those thousands of members are too angry at the apparent spoilers to wallow in self-pity. On the group's discussion boards, a profane war of words is being waged between those who don't want to know how the series ends and those proclaiming to have inside knowledge about who dies -- and gleefully posting the names of the supposedly doomed characters, as many as a dozen different names.

"Dumbass, no one wants to know what the hell happens,'' Jenny Belsky from Toledo, Ohio, writes to a purported spoiler from Georgia. "I have been avoiding that rumour for a couple weeks now. Thanks for that, jackass.''

Even London bookies waver wildly, from week to week, about who's going to die. A few weeks ago they were predicting simply that Harry would die, but in recent days they've taken it further: Harry, they believe, is going to off himself.

Bookies William Hill have cut the price on Harry sacrificing himself from 33-1 to odds on.

They fear fans with inside knowledge of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'' are plotting yet another sting after they were cleaned out when "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'' came out in 2005. Those with the inside scoop bet correctly that headmaster Dumbledore would die.

Rupert Adams, a spokesman for William Hill, told Britain's the Sun tabloid: "The idea has gained momentum with fans. They expect for good to triumph over evil, Harry will have to cause his own death ... there has been so much money put on we fear this is a massive sting by people in the know.''

Bloomsbury Publishers has take extraordinary measures in an attempt to safeguard the plot. The books are slated to be delivered to British bookstores and other retailers in crates bound with steel chains on Friday. GPS technology will even track the trucks delivering the books.

Some still fear bookstores, either in Britain or abroad, might take their chances, break the midnight Friday embargo and put the books on sale early, figuring they've got nothing to lose since "Deathly Hallows'' is the final instalment in the Potter series.

Katherine Rushton, of The Bookseller magazine in the U.K., said recently: "It's quite possible they'd do it to be first and for the PR.''

While online mischief-makers are doing their best to spoil Harry's final adventure, McNally doesn't think any self-respecting bookseller would rain on the Potter parade as it comes to its triumphant end.

"I was wondering if anyone would just say 'screw it' just the other night,'' he said. "But I frankly can't imagine anyone doing it. Why spoil the fun at the very end?''