J.K. Rowling Faces Life Without Harry

Rowling, 41, believes her Potter books will be read for years to come - "Do I think they'll last? Honestly, yes" - but she has no illusions about duplicating their success. Of course I won't write anything as popular as this again," Rowling says. "But I have truthfully known that since 1999, when the thing began to become a little bit insane. So I've had a good long time to know that, and I accept it."

So Rowling is ready to move on, but not before taking a jab at those who posted spoilers on the Internet just days before Hallows was published. Digital photos of every page of the book were put on the Web by an unknown party. "I felt angry," she says, her voice getting louder as she talks about it. "I knew it was about other people's egos." She says she was concerned for her young fans, the "10- and 11-year-olds who really wanted not to know" how the book ended until they'd had a chance to read it.

Two days before Hallows' publication at midnight last Friday, Rowling says, she was alarmed by how prevalent the spoilers had become on the Internet. She likened it to watching a massive dam spring several leaks. It was inevitable, perhaps, with a book of worldwide interest being published in the Internet age, but upsetting nonetheless. "The (leak of the) epilogue upset me most," she said. "I had been working toward that point for a long time. I did have a sense-of-humor failure when the epilogue went up."