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I agree that B&N (or any other seller) has the right to sell PD works at full price, with all the standard restrictions they push on their other works. However, if their explanation is, "For copyright protection purposes, these files are encrypted and cannot be converted or printed," they may be required to indicate whose copyrighted material is involved.
Did B&N register a copyrighted version of their public domain works? Who holds the copyrights on those works--the company, or some third-party hired editor? Do they register just the notes-and-introductions, or the whole book?
One of the shifts I'd like to see in copyright applications, is a requirement to indicate *what* is copyrighted in a book (song/movie/play/whatever); a claim that saying "this work is copyrighted by ____ and any use of it without rightsholder's permission is subject to up to a $150,000 fine," is fraud (an attempt to convince people to pay them money for use that would otherwise be free), if the majority of the work can be quoted/copied/reworked at will.
I'd like publishers to be legally required to indicate what elements of a book are copyrighted.
DRM? Sure; they can do that. However, if they're offering re-TOC'd Gutenberg texts, they have no copyright protection. If their only stated purpose for DRM is copyright protection, I'm not sure how removing that DRM could be illegal... there are no "digital rights" being managed.
And if enough places are offering PD books with DRM, there might be an opening for legal distribution of DRM-removal tools, with a stated purpose of removing unnecessary software blocks from works where the seller has no rights to control their use.
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