Yes, I bought Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at midnight (well, closer to 2 a.m.) on July 21st--even though I had to work at 8 that morning--and yes, I read it within 24 hours. I would have waited and actually tried to do something constructive with my Saturday, but I was terrified of the book being spoiled for me. After all, I started reading the books when I was twelve, and now I'm twenty; like millions of other people, I have become very attached to these characters and didn't want their fates revealed to me before I read them myself.
The fate of one of the characters was spoiled for me on MySpace long before the book's release, which I found incredibly irritating. The same thing happened on Livejournal when book six came out. So I decided to avoid most websites altogether in order to keep the book's plot a secret. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but think about it: is it really necessary for people to go raining on other people's parades?
So they're just books, yes, but they are the most influential and well-known books of our time. When was the last time readers worldwide got this excited about books? I could go on a tangent to argue the importance of escapist fiction in any society, but I won't. Some people think trolling the Internet with spoilers makes them cool, but it's just the jerk thing to do (I have other choice words for them, but since this is ProgressiveU and not Livejournal, I think using them would show a lack of tact on my part). Because it's the Internet, people say and do things much crueler than they would in real life, to people that they know, although I think I heard about a van of people driving by a bookstore when book six came out, yelling the Big Spoiler to people waiting for their books. The people doing the spoiling don't seem to care that however small or seemingly trite, when something has meaning to an individual, it is rude and rather heartless to try to spoil it for them.
Maybe people like this have always existed, but it seems to me that the sense of anonymity on the Internet has facilitated these minor cruelties to flourish. Fortunately, the book is out and millions of people, young and old, have learned the fates of Harry, his friends, and his enemies for themselves and the spoiler rush is over. Unfortunately, the next time society gets excited about something, the spoiler folk will be at it again.
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