Whatever happened to the idea of legal peer-to-peer lending? If I buy a book, it's my property to give away or resell. Why is it any different with an ebook?
If you want that to change, you'll need to get congress to do something about it (lol).
Not all digital books are DRM protected. I recently listened to Cory Doctorow’s audiobook The Bezzel and at the end he tells you that you have the right to loan or sell your copy of the audiobook.
With a physical book, that's much easier; I simply don't have the book anymore. I could technically photocopy the entire myself and have the book as backup, but that's a pretty time-consuming process that most people aren't going to bother with.
The "solution" to this could be some kind of DRM, but of course that has its own can of horrible and problematic worms, not the least of which the fact that central signing servers suck.
I had an idea years ago of trying to have some kind of blockchain-based DRM but I never really figured out how to even get started with it so I never did anything with it. Still, I think it could be worth someone giving it a go.
That's the case regardless of any DRM or even what the source material is. You can OCR a physical book or type the contents into your computer once from any source you can read with your eyes and then make infinite copies thereafter.
The thing that prevents this is that making unlimited permanent copies is copyright infringement, the same as it ever was. Making the unlimited copies is now cheaper than it was a century ago, but that has nothing to do with where or how the infringer gets the first copy.
Never mind breaking DRM, there are services that will OCR a book for around $15. For most books it would cost less to OCR than to buy a single physical copy, from which an infringer could make an unlimited number. Putting this out as some kind of significant distinction between physical and digital copies is just looking for an excuse for a money grab against the new technology.
Even if OCR weren't kind of crappy, which is absolutely is, you still have to physically take a scan or photo of every page, potentially assemble them, load it into the OCR software, then distribute it.
Yes, there are services that will OCR a book for some amount of money, but that's still more work than just copying a digital file. I would still need to package and ship the book, get out my credit card to pay, unpackage the book when it's shipped back.
It's categorically more effort, pretending otherwise is just outright dishonest.
This is the same reason DRM doesn't prevent everything from being on The Pirate Bay. It's not that breaking it is always trivial, it's that you only need one person to do it once. It doesn't matter if it costs one cent or a thousand dollars because neither of those is enough to be a deterrent.
edit: the "right" we have to copy them from device to device I think is just granted by the official interpretation of current law by Library of Congress lawyers. It would be entirely consistent to say that when I sell you an ebook, you get to download it to one machine once, and that copying it to a different machine is a violation.