I will just quote from DRM Watch, which says it as well as I could: "The British Library's document delivery service has been a legendarily comprehensive source of hardcopy documents of all sorts for researchers in the UK and around the world. The inside service, launched several years ago, provides web-based search capabilities and some forms of electronic fulfillment. It was the British Library's logical next step beyond hardcopy delivery, but rightsholders' concerns about copyright infringement limited the proliferation of its digital delivery feature. Now the Library has deployed Adobe's Content Server DRM and content distribution solution, and has started the new service with titles from Elsevier Science's vast array of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals and other types of content. This is an auspicious beginning to a service that could become a category killer in its segment of the publishing industry. If the British Library succeeds in both attracting more publishers to this service and getting users to accept the Adobe DRM solution, it could create a world-class repository of research documents in protected digital download form that will legitimize DRM in the research market and do an end-run around publishers' own online distribution initiatives as well as those from third parties like Overdrive."
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