"I spend about a third of my workday blogging," Dilbert guru Scott Adams admitted in the Wall Street Journal recently. "Thanks to the miracle of online advertising, that increases my income by 1%. I balance that by hoping no one asks me why I do it."

Luckily, a publisher gave Adams big bucks to turn his blog into a book.

Unluckily, "As part of the book deal, my publisher asked me to delete the parts of my blog archive that would be included in the book."

As Felix Salmon notes at Portfolio, that sparked an outcry from readers.

"So now Adams has to offset his six-figure advance against the ill-will of people who 'were personally offended that I would remove material from the Internet that had once been free.'"

Opines Salmon, "Free is only complicated if you try to mess with it and start making it expensive. ... needlessly annoying your blog's readers is extremely unlikely to be a good business decision."

Well, Adams has still got that six-figure advance to keep him warm.

By the way, the cartoonist's blog is a consistently chewy read.

But now that he has the book under his belt, he's decided to blog less.