For what it’s worth, knowing the ending of a book never deterred me from reading it in it’s entirety. In fact, the very first thing I did concerning the final HP book was read the last few pages so I could settle down properly to read the book from the beginning.
I do the same with movies…read every review I can find so I’ll know what to expect.
(Guess I don’t like surprises…)
As for spoiling the ending for “the rest of the world” by asking this question, that’s malarkey. It’s fairly obvious to me that anyone who really doesn’t want to know the answer to this question would simply avoid reading the answer.
Besides…
…some ingenious surfer(s) developed a practice a while ago to address this issue. You see, anyone wishing to reveal a secret of this nature would write SPOILER in huge letters on the first line of their post. This would be a clue to anyone reading that post to skip it if they feared reading that post would ruin their own self discovery.
Then the poster, just prior to revealing the information, would tab down like so…
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...far enough down so the reader wouldn’t mistakenly read something he shouldn’t.
At this point the answer would be revealed!
As to what happened with Harry and Co. in the final installment, @ideabrian certainly knows the answer by now. Had I addressed this question in 2007, I’m sure I would have advised him to
SPOILER
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find out for himself.