Several bookstore owners in Shanghai are unhappy about an increase in the number of people taking photos of pages in expensive books so they don't have to pay for them.

But the shop owners have done little, if anything, to solve the problem themselves. It is common to see people reading in bookstores for hours at time without being asked to buy something or leave, and store owners have taken the same laissez-faire attitude to photography.

The bookstore shutterbugs, who are referred to as paishuzu in Chinese, are mainly students looking for information from reference books.

"Such books are usually expensive, often costing thousands of yuan for one copy. That's too much for a student," said a young man surnamed He in Shanghai Book City. "We do this because it won't make sense to buy the whole book as we only want the content from some of the pages."

Store owners said the practice hurts their interests.

"A more important problem than financial interests is that they infringe the copyright of those book actually," said Jiang Li of Shanghai Book City.

"We have put a sign on the wall telling people not to do it."

(Shanghai Daily March 12, 2007)