I know, I know... this is already on a bajillion and ten blogs and I'm ripping off the title of a blog written by a far more clever individual. I just decided I needed to come out of semi-retirement to post on this.
It seems that someone in Germany managed to get a copy of the final book in the Sookie Stackhouse series. Rather than quietly read it in secret and share the ending with only a few people, they pretty much broadcast the ending to most of the Internet, knowing that the pairing at the end of the book would probably piss off a lot of readers. Knowing that not everyone wants to know about the spoiler ahead of time and not wanting the flame fest between readers and towards her to continue, she politely asked for people to not talk about the book until it released.
Many readers respected this, but it seems like there were a ton of people that threw hissy fits about this and came up with various theories about why Harris requested this and other such ideas. Mary Janice Davidson wrote a rather informative blog about this, so I'll not bother restating it here although I will summarize some of it.
What irritated me the most was that people were saying that Harris was trying to stifle free speech and that she had no right to write the ending she did. While it's been a while since I've read the books (I lost interest in them a while ago for various reasons), she can write the endings any way she wants. Every author does. Does this mean it's necessarily the ending everyone would want or the best ending to the series? No, but it's their prerogative to write the way they want to.
It's just poor form for people to jump all over this the way they have.
Further Reading:
*The Bullying of Charlaine Harris and the Wisdom of Neil Gaiman
A blog where I review a little bit of everything, especially urban fantasy, anthropological thrillers, mysteries, and anything along the lines of James Rollins.