Harry Potter and the Deathly Spoilers (Spoiler-free)

Warning: The following article refers to spoilers about spoilers about Harry Potter And The Deathly Hollows. Reading these spoilers may spoil the fun of reading the original spoilers.

What is it about today's self-centric journalism ethics that allows someone to spoil the readings of captive audiences worldwide ? I'm not talking about unravelling the intense plots in the latest Harry Potter book. After all, rumours about certain characters' demise have been floating around the Internet ever since J.K. Rowling announced the release of the last installment in the popular book series. Rather, I'm talking about being forced to read a book sooner rather than later, so I do not accidentally stumble upon a spoiler that would ruin the entire experience for me.

Like many geeks, I get my news via RSS feeds, all from different sources. Given the hundreds of news articles I filter through a day, I often stumble across a spoiler reading, and my hand moves the cursor to my browser's "Back" button faster than Lucky Luke can draw his pistol, hoping that my brain has not had time to register the text I have laid eyes upon. Luckily, these spoiler warnings are great for me; I want to discover what happens at my own pace, and in my own imagination.

But what happened to the days of journalism when integrity existed, and book reviewers were free to write about the book's plot, without revealing deep details about how the plot unravels ? Today, there seems to be more spoilers about the book than there are actual reviews. A search on Google for the keywords "harry potter" "deathly hallows" reviews spoilers returns over 1,020,000 hits. That's 1,020,000 web articles I might stumble across, and 1,020,000 web articles I refuse to read until I've finished the book.

So the choice is clear - I must finish reading the book before I can actually read a review about it, and comment on it. This does not make much sense, when you think of the logic behind why comment forums were invented in the first place.

But maybe I'm taking this too seriously. After all, it's only a children's book, right ?