After reading Economics: The User’s Guide by Ha-Joon Chang, published by Pelican Books, I feel confident enough to explain the word “disintermediation”. This catchy term means cutting out the middlemen from a supply chain, and it’s crucial to an understanding of modern publishing. Amazon has been trying to cut out publishers for two decades, in the hope of achieving a more efficient ecosystem. Publishers, once they got wind of this, started thinking of clever ways they could turn the tables: that is, cutting out Amazon and going direct to consumers.

A new front in this literary conflict has opened at pelicanbooks.com, although it looks less like a battlefield than a boutique in an online Marylebone High Street. Penguin’s original non-fiction imprint relaunched earlier this year, its predictably covetable paperbacks glowing with turquoise nostalgia for the days when people bettered themselves rather than slumping in front of Gogglebox. Pelican’s digital incarnation is stunning, its flat design bold yet understated, with a studied simplicity reflected in the intuitive user experience.

Like Allen Lane’s paperbacks, it is also quietly revolutionary. The site is not merely a portal, it’s a destination in its own right. While there are links to buy the paperback and ePub from Penguin (and the Kindle version from Amazon), pelicanbooks.com is really about browser-based reading. For £4.99, I could scroll through Ha-Joon Chang’s book on Pelican’s lovely cloudreader, clicking on footnotes and quoting passages on Twitter. It’s perfect for students.

You could save a quid with the Kindle version – and access it on Amazon’s Cloud Reader too. However, then you’d be missing out on the pleasures of bespoke design tailored to work on any device, unobtrusive interactivity, beautifully presented images and diagrams and the perfect font (Freight, if you’re wondering). Amid the struggle to control the online marketplace, Pelican reminds us why the reading experience should come first.