Hachette are long-time sore about ebooks especially. They lost rather badly in a fight with Amazon back in 2014 [0], and recently have been gobbling up every small publishing house they can get their hands on (or just fabricating new ones for laughs) to the point it's destabilizing the book industry [1].

In many ways, Hachette is the lumbering cancer that is killing book publishing. They want to believe that putting out a new version of a 100-year-old public domain book is worth fighting in court about in many cases.

Copyright reform needs to happen.

[0] https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/1...

[1] https://www.vox.com/culture/22176959/publishing-protests-hac...