Guest Column: Minding the Store
If the Internet has taught traditional media anything, it’s that valuable content should be protected or it will quickly lose its worth. Letting music, news articles or whatever fall into the hands of those who do not value it has been toppling old media companies left and right, and is likely to continue. Take newspapers: Had their stories not been copied, pasted, snarked upon and uprooted far from their original sources (and the advertisers), there wouldn’t be nearly as many journalists in the unemployment line today. Even as we come to understand the protect-your-content lesson when it comes to the digital world, we are slow to apply its relevance to the brick-and-mortar one. After all, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise, most consumers buy books—yes, print books—at physical, non-Internet store locations, according to multiple research sources. That isn’t changing anytime soon, no matter how many electronic reading devices are thrown at consumers.