Rowling reads the opening chapter of Deathly Hallows...

Here's a link to a video of Rowling and fans at midnight BST in London's Natural History Museum, where she read them the entire opening chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, titled "The Dark Lord Ascending." Yes, you can listen to it all right now!

Given this, I decided to download the PDF version of the so called leak, and I must say, this reading matched it almost verbatum, minus 10 words or so. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the "leaked" image files of the book's pages that are out there, so I can't compare it to those. At this point then, it's hard to say whether the entire thing is legit or not. It's already off by a number of words -- several that shouldn't have resulted from a copyist error and also didn't seem likely to have been accidentally skipped over by Rowling in her reading -- which makes me wonder why the mistakes were there. Did this copy not come from the final draft? I'm not reading any more of the PDF version, but I will do some comparison after I pick up my book tonight, though by then I'm sure the full scoop will already be all over the web. Oh well. For now, enjoy Rowling's reading.