Shoplifters find a taste for literature

Britain's bookshops have joined forces to tackle one of the biggest growth areas in High Street crime - book theft.

Ever since medieval libraries chained books to the shelves thieves have been a scourge. But retailers say that thefts are soaring and the thieves are becoming increasingly cunning.

Last year, theft from booksellers, stationers and newsagents jumped from pounds 28m to pounds 71m, according to the British Retail Consortium. Of this, pounds 32.5m was due to book loss.

The Booksellers Association and major retailers are investigating whether tagging at source, while the book is being printed, is the solution.

Next month, Britain's biggest bookseller, W H Smith, will start trials of tagging for books. Magnetic strips will be inserted into the spine during printing where they cannot be seen and removed. The sensitive tag cannot be shielded by body or metal, and can also be reactivated if books are returned.

Booksellers say the rise in book theft is due to professional thieves stealing because new books can be sold on easily at second-hand stores and car-boot sales. Ken Harwood, head of security for Dillons said: "There's always been the opportunist thief who sees a book they need or want, but now it's big business. People have told us of being approached when they are in bookshops and told, 'If you want that book, meet me outside in 10 minutes and you can have it for half price'."

While the most popular stolen books reflect the reading public's taste - bestsellers such as Terry Pratchett and Danielle Steele are stolen regularly - others are targeted because their cost makes them popular on the second- hand market: art books and atlases, for instance.

Shoplifters are also attracted by the ease with which certain books can be hidden, such as small Beatrix Potter and Winnie the Pooh books. Popular methods of theft still include hiding books down the back of trousers or inside the large inside pockets of a poacher's jacket.

Other thieves step into lifts in large stores to hide stolen books on their person. Thieves have been spotted in large stores walking about with credit cards and books in hand - looking like bona fide browsers, until the moment when they pop unpaid-for books into a bag.

Bob Goslin, head of security for the W H Smith group, said some people were even brazen enough to go in a shop with boxes and fill them up. "Books are readily disposable as second-hand goods - there are a lot of outlets for stolen property," he said. "Professionals steal to order the handlers will request certain titles and the thieves will go and get them."

Concern among retailers has grown so much that they have formed a working party with the Booksellers Association to find new ways of curbing book crime. An association spokesman said: "With most retail items it's easy to tell where they came from, but with books it's very hard to know where they came from or hard to prove they were stolen."

The group will be studying whether electronic defences, such as the magnetic tags being tried out by Smiths, are the solution. Already bookshops are using closed-circuit television and include disabling tags to monitor crime.

The electronic tags, which set off an alarm if a book is illegally taken out of the store, are inserted manually into the books by staff, which is arduous and time-consuming.

The main problem for booksellers remains the British way of shopping. As Ken Harwood said: "The British public like to look and handle goods before they buy them. If we put our books in glass cabinets out of reach they wouldn't be stolen but people would also lose their inclination to buy."