Media blackout starting early
Well I had it all planned out. Book 7 comes out at 0001 on Saturday. Since that's also the day Tracie and I are leaving for the outer Banks for a week long vacation with my family, I figured that getting the whole book read before someone spoiled the ending wouldn't be a problem. I'd only have to avoid watching TV, and reading the news for a day or two, since I'd have multiple days in a row at the beach to read as much as I wanted.
So much for that idea. Someone apparently posted individual digital camera pictures of every page of the book on a peer 2 peer file sharing site, and people are beginning to post spoilers on the web. Now a few years ago this wouldn't be much of a problem, because I could just go to major news sites for a few days, and I trust places like CNN enough not to post spoilers in their headlines at least, so I could avoind reading any stories that mention Harry Potter. Unfortunatly most sites have some kind of user discussion/comment area on them, and some jacka$$'$ are anomonously posting key spoilers to random news story comment areas. So yeah I won't be reading much news, or at least I'll be being very careful about how fast I scrolll down the page.
I doubt this will hurt the book sales any since anyone that's that anxious to get the book that they're willing to find the bittorrent, sort all the JPEG images into the right order, and squint/zoom in to read every page 3 days early is probably a big enough fan to actually buy the book anyways when it comes out. But what it does do is spoil it for most people who were waiting till the book came out and would prefer to have the story line developed before learning what the climax is. Ahh well hopefully nothing important happens in the next few days in world news ...
(Yeah it might seem a bit extreme to stop reading news sites for a few days just for a kids book, but the part of my vacation I was really looking forward to was having a good long fresh book to read while I'm relaxing on the beach down there. reading on the beach, or out on the deck is one of my favorite relaxing things to do, and I hardly ever do it!)