Steal This Book

Ebooks and digital readers spell the end of the time honored tradition of shoplifting books. Author Rachel Shteir talks about what we’re going to lose about ourselves when books can no longer be stolen from a store.

Jul 5, 2011 , The Daily Beast

There is one thing I have not heard discussed in any symposium on The Future of Books, even though it represents as big a shift in the zeitgeist as the platform of how we read books or where we buy them: I am talking about The End of Shoplifting Books.

As books disappear, they will join CDs, DVDs, and LPs as items that were once desirable but now can be picked up for next to nothing in flea markets and pawn shops or on Ebay. No one will steal them anymore.

I do not mean to suggest that shoplifting is good. Shoplifting books, like all shoplifting, can damage a store's profits, and at a time when bookstores are struggling, this is not a good thing.

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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.
Full piece at The Daily Beast,