It is a reasonable compromise between amazon and the publishers that will hopefully become better as time goes by. As the publishers become more and more comfortable with it and less concerned that it will destroy their business (e.g. they'll need to adapt) the restrictions will get lighter, much like they did with iTunes.
Right now, my girlfriend and I are reading the same physical book. I read it at work over my lunch break and she reads it at night before going to bed. Is this piracy too?
I think based on the current connectivity and technology of things this is probably the best compromise they could come up with.
Your girlfriend and I can't read the book at the same physical time (unless you read at the same pace and are at the same point, I suppose). A distributed lock mechanism could be used for it, but it doesn't look like Amazon came up with these terms - the publishers did. See my other comment, but this is the exact same terms which were set on the Nook lending when it came out.
My girlfriend and I have already solved the lending issue by sharing a single Amazon account for just our Kindle purchases. Then we both just registered our Kindles to that shared account. The only problem we run into is trying to remember not to "sync to furthest page read" for anything we're both reading at the same time.
The key concept here is 'excludability'. Only one person (maybe two) can be physically reading it at once. Digital goods, sans DRM, could in theory be shared with pretty much the entire world without depriving anyone of their experience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excludability
This difference between ebooks and 'real' books is the heart of the problem, and why people want to introduce artificial excludability. Actually, I'm fine with that: treat it like a real book in terms of only letting one person at a time have it, but let me freely choose who has it when and for how long.
It's like if you weren't allowed to skip tracks on a CD, but had to fast-forward through each individual song so that it would be more like a cassette tape.
This way the book will be available on your device (since it doesn't know it's been lent out) and on your friend's device. Just don't re-enable wireless until you're done with the book or the loan has expired.
This way, at least, I was able to share a book with a friend and we could both read it at the same time to discuss it.
I am personally still at the "I buy books I am interested in even if I won't read them for a while, as long as they're available for Kindle and not more expensive than the paperback, to reward the publisher for making them available on Kindle" stage, but if I were angry at publishers (as I am at the RIAA), the above would seem like a better solution.
Note the word "sellers" - they don't make any money from lending, just from selling.
They're really scared that they'll sell one copy and everyone will read that copy (or copies of it).
Note - "they should make less money" isn't an answer.
They should make more money isn't a very good answer, either.
eBooks are massively cheaper to distribute, yet we see a minimal discount. Add in the fact that they're limiting lending to once per book when I can lend a physical book infinitely many times and you're looking at higher profits for eBooks than normal books.
Because distribution is a small amount of the cost of production.
I don't buy or use ebooks because of how convenient it is to copy them and give the copies to other people. I use them because they're more convenient for me.
Edit: Do the downvoters disagree on the benefits of having a book in electronic form? Or do they think that the restrictions are not unreasonable/ridiculous?