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As noted earlier, DRM does nothing to prevent piracy. It’s in place on the Kindle to provide proprietary lock-in for Amazon and a little hand-holding comfort for nervous publishers.  It serves to annoy and alienate potential paying customers. The Kindle has great potential as a device, but as long as Amazon continues to cripple it, readers would be advised to seek alternative e-book solutions.

"What I believe—and this is what we're putting to the test—is that as you're putting something online free of charge, you may lose a few sales, but you'll gain other sales because more people will know about it," said Frances Pinter, Bloomsbury Academic's publisher.

She would like Bloomsbury Academic to demonstrate that publishers can add editorial value to scholarship without having to choose between locking it down or giving it all away.

hree centuries ago, John Locke agreed that we shouldn't base our freedom to read books on the proclaimed good offices of the business itself. "Books seem to me to be pestilent things," he wrote in 1704, "and infect all that trade in them...with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind, that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society, and that general fairness that cements mankind."