Lol you’ve never stolen a book from the library before either intentionally or not? This should be pretty straightforward but the more valuable something is the more incentive there is to steal it. Meanwhile, while you can throw more money at physical security and scale it up, technology hasn’t changed much in 50 years let alone 20 - you hire enough people at considerable expense and implement good basic security systems. This costs money and stupid tech like “slap an rfid tag on it” doesn’t change anything