Author and journalist Nick Bilton wrote a New York Times essay about the ethics of taking smartphone photos of books, explaining how he used his cell phone camera inside a Barnes & Noble recently.

Here’s more from the essay: “As we lobbed the books back and forth, sharing kitchen layouts and hardwood floor textures, we snapped a dozen pictures of book pages with our iPhones. We wanted to share them later with our contractor. After a couple of hours of this, we placed the books back on the shelf and went home, without buying a thing.”

What do you think? Should bookstore customers be able to photograph book pages? How about library patrons?