My ePrison

July 19th, 2007 by david lay

With the most anticipated event in literary history coming up this Friday at midnight, millions and millions of people worldwide are preparing for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the 7^th and final book in the heralded Harry Potter franchise. For the past several weeks spoilers have been popping up here and there, most of them fake or pure speculation. But earlier this week, it was confirmed that DeepDiscount.com inadvertently shipped some copies of the book to customers who had pre-ordered them.

By Wednesday morning, the book was all over the internet. Someone took pictures of each page of the book and posted them online. Torrents of the image files were made available on Demonoid.com and soon, people were transcribing the chapters and making the text available as well. Several of the country’s prominent newspapers, including the New York Times, published early reviews of the book as the wildfire continued to spread.

Being a Harry Potter fan, and being one who never reads the end of a book first, I began to fear that at some point between Wednesday morning and Friday night, I would accidently stumble upon, or overhear a discussion about how it would end…

This has led to a considerable amount of paranoia and has held me captive in my self-created, Potter-free bubble. Luckily, my friends and co-workers understand and have been nice enough to not discuss their findings with me (though I have endured numerous taunts and jokes – all in good fun). But, I have been avoiding blogs, message boards, and even legitimate news sites in order to curb any possibility of being met by a troll who would enjoy spoiling it for me.

I work for an internet marketing company and spend at least 8 hours a day in front of a computer – this adds to the difficulty of trying to avoid these sites.

I was supposed to take a trip to BFE, New Mexico this week – which would have helped shield me – but the trip was canceled a couple of weeks ago and, alas, here I am, doing all I can to avoid 99 % of the internet.

In the past 2 days, my internet surfing has been entirely limited to gmail, my own blog, OrangeSoda.com, and clients’ websites that I am working with. This has made for some seriously dull internet time… I have even been avoiding YouTube because I was told that there are spoiler videos there that leak the ending (after a seemingly unrelated beginning).

I’m sure that this is all irrational to most of you, but if I make it to the end and learn it all the hard way, it will be worth it. It will make the read so much more fun. If I knew the ending before I began, I would be missing so much of the excitement that I enjoy from these books. This is the last one…There will be no #8 for people to spoil, nor will it be there for me to enjoy. I have to make the best of this one, and that’s what I intend to do.

The internet’s invisible bars won’t be able to hold me for long.

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