I have often heard that “the Bible is the most shoplifted book in America”. It’s deliciously ironic, but A) it’s too deliciously ironic and B) it doesn’t seem plausable when I think about it.
I emailed Snopes, but they never replied back. So I ask you:
Do booksellers keep track of which books get lifted the most?
If so, where do Bibles fall on the list?
Is it shoplifted or stolen? Because if you were to count the Gideon bibles walking off from hotel rooms as stolen that might skew the data. The Gideons don’t regard them as stolen though, they just assume they’ve found their way into the hands of someone who needed one.
My suspicion is Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book is probably the most stolen book.
Bibles are by far the most common books in the U.S. over time so that doesn’t sound surprising if they are just looking at raw numbers.
I don’t know of any good statistics regarding the titles of books that get shoplifted. I have experience of the inner working for two bookstores (one because I worked there and another because a good friend worked there), and neither tracked shoplifting as a separate category. They did an inventory count periodically and any discrepancy was just marked as “loss.” Loss included books discarded due to damage on the shelves and books lost in the warehouse as well as those stolen. While both stores could generate a list by title, that list didn’t get transmitted anywhere that would permit a summary of books nationally
To be fair, maybe they hadn’t actually read that part yet when they decided to steal it.
I used to work for a large chain bookstore. Bibles were certainly stolen but to what degree I don’t know other than to say it was not uncommon.
The shrink reports I saw had losses per category (fiction, religion, art, history etc.). and not per book.
I don’t really remember the numbers now but IIRC, fiction had the largest rate of shrink which makes sense simply because it had the largest selection per category.
In general, anything fairly expensive had a much higher chance of being stolen which again makes sense.
So things like art & photography books and textbooks (particularly business and medical books) were all at risk. Also titles preferred by teens (Manga and graphic novels) were stolen regularly.
IMHO, if you were to look at shrink by genre, far and away, the most stolen honors would go to urban fiction. We would get 10 or 20 copies of a title in and they would disappear the same day. Anything other than completely removing them from view would result in their being stolen.
This, btw, was in NYC. Obviously, shink statistics will change by location.
Also, if I had to hazard a guess, books were more often stolen for resale and not by an individual shoplifter. This is particularly evident when multiple copies of a single book disappear.
At the store I worked for (and at several other locations), there were outdoor vendors selling books a couple of blocks away from us. Guess where those books came from?
We actually had customers complain that are prices were more expensive than those of the street vendors. Stupidity knows no bounds.
That’s what I was thinking when I saw this post. If the majority of Americans are Christian, and the majority of Christians own a Bible, well, more Bibles would be owned than any other book. And if it’s the most owned book, it could quite possibly be the most stolen book. But that’s just my WAG.
A round-table article on which books are often shoplifted. And here’s Rosenbaum’s original article, which he mentions in the discussion.
Another article by an independent bookstore owner on which books are most often stolen.
That’s interesting. The interveiw indicates that Bibles sometimes are a top steal.
I would not be surprised if it were true, and this is more or less the logic that I would use to reason why. However, I’m not sure it’s a very meaningful statistic and a rate of theft vs. rate of purchase might be more useful. To give an analogy, a software company might note that the PC version of a product is stolen more than the MAC version of the same software. Chances are good that that’s true; however, since the PC version also likely appeals to a significantly larger audience, that doesn’t mean much. In that case, I would think, again, adjusting for the market would give a more meaningful statistic.
As someone else mentioned upthread who worked at a bookstore, I’d intuitively believe that periodicals, fiction, and textbooks to be among the highest theft rate. So, while it may be technically true the the Bible is the most stolen, I think it’s misleading.
As a data-point, here’s a wiki page on the best selling books of all time and, with one possible exception (I’m not willing to put in the effort to determine an accurate number for that one), the Bible has old-sold everything else by at least an order of magnitude.
Totally anecdotal, but I used to work at a Christian bookstore. We had a certain family (older gentleman and two adult daughters) that we were always alerted the moment the walked in the store. The man had a pastor’s discount card, although that doesn’t necessarily mean much. Anyway, I was told that the girls had been caught putting performance tapes in their pockets and purses (the kind where one side is the song with singer and the other side is just music so you can sing it in church).
They also had to be watched with the books and especially the Bibles. I know that once when I checked the man out, he was buying a fairly cheap Bible, but one that was still nice enough to come in a box (like $15 or $20). But when I opened the box and checked the ISBN on the Bible against the ISBN on the box, he had put a $80-$100 Bible in the box. I wonder if, in his mind, he was still “buying” the Bible, so it was okay, or what was going on.
It was always strange, but as booksellers we weren’t allowed to shoo them out. Just get the manager and keep an eye on them. He would shoo them if they did anything wrong.