With one day left till the worldwide release of the last instalment of the Harry Potter series, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’, spoilers threaten to ruin the ending for all of us. Mahima Kaul explains why you need to watch where you click

• What is with this Harry Potter mania?

When J.K. Rowling started to write the series, she did not have a target audience in mind. Her publishing house, Bloomsbury, assumed it would appeal to children the most. But its imagination, themes, and the hard questions it poses have transcended age. It’s not everyday that a series sells 325 million copies worldwide — and is translated into 63 languages! 250 million copies of Deathly Hallows have already been pre-ordered. Britain is going to release a series of 7 postage stamps to commemorate the event! Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the movie adaptation of the fifth book, raked in $330 million worldwide on its first weekend. An entire industry that includes toys and games feeds off the Harry Potter franchise. Mania, indeed!

• What are spoilers? And fan-fic?

Spoilers basically tell you the plot of a yet unreleased movie/book. Harry Potter is not the only series to face this problem — for the Sex and the City finale, four separate endings were shot, so that if one ending leaked, they could use another so as to keep the finale fresh for viewers.

Some Potter fans, such as those who run the websites www.the-leaky-cauldron.org and www.mugglenet.com vowed to keep away from spoilers, and have refused to publish the rumours of plot-points floating around the Internet.

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