Lending e-books

Frankly I don't see any indications that the trajectory of electronic book sales will go differently than music and movies. Same insanely anti-customer pathological obsession with turning sales into "licenses," same obsession with DRM, same outcome: the illegal edition is quite likely to become the more consumer-friendly version.

Today people torrent individual albums and movies, or perhaps a trilogy, or a collection of all the albums of a single band. Given the incredible efficiency of text compression, it is entirely conceivable that soon people might be faced with the decision to rent for $10 a non-shareable copy of a single book, or to just download in one shot, "all books released electronically in english, ever [mar 2011 edition]".

The fact that you aren't buying the e-book, but instead paying the fee for a very restrictive licence, needs to be made much clearer to e-book users.

This would mean Amazon and Barnes & Noble using the wording 'license this book' instead of 'sell', 'sale', 'purchase' or 'buy'; instead of a price, you pay a fee.

Nudges, and informed consumers, FTW.

I agree with many of the article author's points. However, I am also extremely aware that I typically pay under half the price of the physic book for e-books. Given that paying authors, editorial and production staff is often the most significant cost in producing a book I feel like it's a trade-off.

I'm giving up some rights I'd like, for much lower cost item. For the most part I'm ok with that.

Obviously if there was a better option for lending ebooks I'd take it.

So unnecessarily restrictive!

Does anybody have any online resources they can point me to that details the legalities of lending physical or electronic books?

Thanks.