Book Shoplifting Going Away Because of E-Books?

Say it isn't so!

To note: I stole a thick baseball card price guide from B. Dalton once. Don't tell anyone.

From a piece in the Daily Beast...

And yet book shoplifting differs from other variations of the five-finger discount in that it seems to arise, at least in some instances, not merely out of a desire to resell the stolen item, but from an aspirational craving to read—to be literary—or some other high-minded hunger, such as the one for knowledge. I was reminded of this romantic notion while reading Roberto Bolano’s short essay, ‘Who Would Dare?’ in Between Parentheses, a collection of his posthumous pieces recently published. "Who Would Dare?" describes a longing for books as intense as the one for a lover. “The books I remember most are the ones I stole in Mexico City from the age of sixteen to nineteen,” Bolano begins, going on to write of his shoplifting in reverential tones.

Why does Bolano do it? Like many book thieves, because he was young and poor. But also, because he liked the challenge and the risk.

A bookstore made out of glass and steel, a fortress as much as a refuge, propels Bolano to his first theft. As he swipes eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers and poets, he relates not just his technique, but how the sneaky act set aflame his hunger to read.

Camus drove him over the edge: “After I stole that book and read it," he writes about The Fall, "I went from being a prudent reader to being a voracious reader.”