It's a shame that they did this. I think Neil Gaiman summarized the wonderful benefits of using the web as a lending tool for books. He has a fantastic interview clip regarding his outlooks on piracy of his books that you can view here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlIHere's the transcript, emphasis mine:
When the web started I used to get really grumpy with people, because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this A.) a belief, which was completely erronious, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn't tell them to take it down you would lose your copyright - which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was [that] places where I was being pirated, particularly Russa where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was facinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took American Gods, a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it, and download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independant bookstores because that's all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent.
I started to realize that actually, you're not losing books. You're not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, "Well what about the sales that I'm losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?" I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I'd say, "Do you have a favorite author?" They'd say, "Yes." and I'd say, "Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands." And then, "Anybody who discovered their favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands," and it's probably about five, ten percent. If that, of the people who actually discovered their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and treasure the fact that they got this author.
Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that's how they found their favorite author. I thought, "You know, that's really all this is. It's people lending books. You can't look on that as a loss of sale. It's not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free." What you're actually doing is advertising. You're reaching more people, raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idiea of the shape of copyright and what the web was doing. The biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they otherwise wouldn't have seen. Basically that's an incredibly good thing.