Sorry, Im generalizing more of how the publisher views it.

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.

No problems. I get the point, and understand your take on the publisher's views. As someone else mentioned, it's the same growing pains we had to go through with digital music, and there is some frustration that we'll have to deal with the same issues over and over again for each new industry.

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.

> 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?

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.