books just wanna be free

I got pretty pissed off listening to NPR's American Readers, Waiting Impatiently For 'The Girl' about people who really wanted to read the third book in Stieg Larsson's very popular Millennium Trilogy that isn't due to be published in the US until May. When they found out it was already out in English in the UK they either ordered it via Amazon UK or got their local bookstore to import it. The local bookstores were asked to stop importing copies because it is apparently against copyright law. Someone from the trilogy's US publisher said, "'What I would say to readers is, I would encourage them to shop at their local bookseller here in the United States or their online bookseller in the United States, where no laws are being broken and you are supporting the continuing discovery of world literature.'" What an ass! If it is illegal to import books from overseas, then the law should be changed! The guy goes on to pompously say, "'If there is a fourth book — and we know that there are 200 pages of a fourth book somewhere — I can assure you that we will consider, if we ever have the opportunity to publish it, we will consider publishing it simultaneously with our U.K. partner.'" Thanks for deigning to "consider" such an idea because if you don't you'll just lose more business as people order from overseas! These kinds of restrictive attitudes when any number of foreign booksellers are just a search and mouse click away seem to be part of why some of these older industries aren't doing so well now.