"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" won't be on sale until July 21, but fans are busier than the Sorting Hat on the first day of a new term at Hogwarts.

They're discussing, dissecting and dishing on what has happened so far in the series and what will happen in the seventh and final book.

There's plenty to talk about.

Scholastic, the U.S. publisher of the Potter series, has turned up the heat on the pre-publication debate by releasing the first of its "7 Questions of Harry Potter," which it hopes will provoke lots of chatter over the next few months.

Questions will be posted every two weeks at scholastic.com/harrypotter and select retail Web sites. Visitors to the Scholastic site will be linked to Discussion Chamber message boards, where they can chat with other fans.

Scholastic is distributing to stores 5.5 million bookmarks with the seven questions. Question No. 1, "Who Will Live? Who Will Die?" is the hottest topic.

"Who dies is the No. 1 thing on people's minds," says Emerson Spartz, 20, who at 12 founded mugglenet.com, one of the biggest Potter fan sites in the universe. The site gets about 20 million hits a month.

Spartz and fellow mugglenet.com editors are the authors of "Mugglenet.com's What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Falls in Love and How Will the Adventure Finally End?" (Ulysses Press, $13.95).

There are plenty of other places to talk about Harry.

Barnes & Noble is hosting discussions about all the books in its online Waiting for Harry Book Club (bn.com/bookclubs). The chain just announced that presales of the book — 500,000 — have surpassed presales for any book in the company's history. They predict presales will top 1 million. (Amazon reports it has presales of more than 500,000.)

Meanwhile, fans are turning to a growing number of unauthorized guides as they ratchet up their Potter trivia intelligence quotient, including: