@Kaarme Agreed, although instead of draconian I'd say stupid. Sure the book was far from the shelf it came from, however it was still close to other shelves and it was within the same room. It would be extremely unconfortable to read a book close to the shelf where it came from, if you have many people renting books in one same room. Imagine if you need to borrow multiple volumes to find one piece of information and have other people help you by having each one look through a different volume. You would automatically trigger the security even though there was no danger of someone stealing the books.
Well, that is an unnecessarily secure and brutal library. If people can't checks books out, or even read them in a more comfortable room in the library building, than what is even the point?
So if Pom can understand that many language, why can’t Mira use it do decipher the message in the first place, saving her all the trouble of going into the library?