Divergent Book 3 Accidentally Ships Early, Author Veronica Roth Begs Fans Not To Spoil

Back before the internet, if a shipment of books from a popular young adult series went out a month ahead of schedule, the odds of spoilers making their way around the globe in a month's time probably wouldn't be that high. But we're living in the digital age, when all it takes is a few taps of the keyboard to wreck someone's reading experience. That may prove to be a problem for fans of Veronica Roth's Divergent series. If you count yourself among them, you may be aware that the third and final book in the popular dystopian trilogy is expected to hit shelves in less than a months time. But the novel, titled Allegiant has already made it into the hands of some lucky fans due to a shipping error, and the book's author has issued a plea to those readers not to spoil people with the story's ending.

Via Hypable, Roth posted on her blog that a "Canadian shipping error" resulted in "a very small number of readers" receiving finished copies of Allegiant. Her post includes the following request to anyone who might have gotten a copy of the book:

Yeah, I'm thinking many of those readers aren't going to be able to sit on the book for a month. But it seems like a very reasonable request to ask them not to spread the spoilers or quotes anywhere. Not only is this the third book in a very popular series (that's about to become a movie), but it's expected to be the end of the story, so there may be a lot to spoil. With that in mind, I'm with Roth. To those lucky fans out there who have a copy of the book, please be kind and keep the spoilers away from the internet!

Or we could look at this from a Faction level. In Roth's world, if such a situation were to arise, the Amity people might be kind enough to not spoil, but the Candids probably wouldn't be able to help themselves. Abnegations would surely send the book back without so much as cracking the cover, while Erudites might not spoil the book outside their faction but they'd probably spend the next few weeks reading and cataloging it in preparation to update the fan sites and wikia pages on October 22 the second the information book is released to the public. And I guess the Dauntless people would be out scouring the neighborhood tracking down every copy of the book, after which they'd await orders on what to do with them.

While the majority of fans continue to wait for Allegiant to arrive on shelves, there are other Divergent-related distractions, including the recently released World of Divergent bonus book, which is free in eBook format, and the first of the four planned Tobias ebooks. Here's the schedule of releases:

September 3 - The Transfer.

September 24 - The World of Divergent: The Path to Allegiant.

October 22 - Allegiant.

December 17 - The Initiate.

January 21 - The Son.

February 11 - The Traitor.

And then the feature adaptation of Divergent arrives in theaters March 21, 2014.