With the days of frantically clicking away pop ups behind us, ad-blocking software may seem like the perfect way to view your favorite sites in peace. And yet, as Ken Fisher explains, this software may be hurting your favorite blogs, new sites, and other interweb ventures.

Because advertisements pay the sites they use on a per-view basis, patrons running the software are actually denying more and more funding to sites they visit most. Fisher puts a plea out to the internet at large, asking visitors to ditch the software and tolerate the flashing banners and i-pod contest scams (or, god forbid, one could subscribe for an ad-free experience). For the good of the internet; for the good of the sites we all love and cherish.

As the term “self-publishing”  became more common in the vernacular, the prospect of DIY literature was seen as godsend, bridging the gap between writer and reader, creating a corporate publisher-free utopia. And yet in her article “Self-Publishing, Author Services Open Floodgates for Writers,” Carla King asserts that ever-more common practice may not deliver all we’ve thought it would promise.

When everything from cover design to boxes of neatly packaged books become as easy as the click of a mouse (and the emptying of a bank account), King contemplates whether this market, so praised in it’s beginning, may be loosing it’s rose-colored sheen.

Digitized books, whether they be in kindle form or otherwise, are more than just a fad, and although Google Books is growing by the day, many authors have recently chosen to opt-out of Google’s ever-expanding digital library. The dissenting authors have grown since the issue with Google arose, now tallying some 6,500, including Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith, Phillip Pullman, Bret Easton Ellis, James Frey, and Michael Chabon. And although the immediate reasons for their choice may seem purely financial (digitized works may hurt sales), authors instead discuss the philosophical nature of copywrite:

“It seems they plan, unilaterally, to take ownership away from the writer, and the ownership doesn’t pass to the readers (fat chance!) but to a giant profit-making corporation. A vast entity allegedly intent on ‘doing nothing evil’ has simply decided this will be so…” – Gwythen Jones

Even in the face of digital media takeover the sentiment of ownership, of giving credit where credit is due, carries on.

An old professor from college writes me and asks for my snail mail address. It isn’t such a strange request – we have developed a kind of friendship since I graduated. I babysit his daughter on occasion; we meet at the corner store for coffee when we can both find time, which is almost never.

A week later a package arrives at my mother’s house, where I am staying for a month to sort some things out. The package is addressed in my professor’s handwriting, and inside is Nick Flynn’s The Ticking Is the Bomb. The book is yellow, with a silver and blue graphic on the paperback cover, drooping in my hand as I hold it, standing in the middle of my mother’s hallway. …more