You own the paper book. The words are protected by copyright, sure, but that's not the same as the restrictive lease that ebooks are subject to. Very different beast.
You are perfectly welcome to share the medium itself (e.g. the ebook reader), it just so happens that with physical books, the medium lends itself (pun intended) to sharing.
Either way, you actually don't own the text in the same way, as amazon has demonstrated that they think they have the right to revoke your account and therefore access to the data.
There's a mixup in terminology here. We're not talking about lending the medium the book is printed in. We're talking about copying all the words over to someone else's machine, maybe with a promise to delete it on your own machine. The thing is, the right to copy the contents of a book is restricted by copyright and can only be done with the permission of the copyright holder.
So let's rephrase this to be more precise:
> The tech to lend or entirely transfer the contents of a paper book or an ebook via copying is clearly there (some books can be lent once for two weeks), you are operating in an environment where the vendor does not allow it.
And yes, exactly. Both for print and electronic books, copying the words and sending them to somebody is not allowed without the permission of the copyright holder.
You don't have to like the system, I certainly have issues with the system as it's set up. But it's perfectly obvious that under any standard interpretation of the concept of copyright, it means that the copyright holder has exclusive rights to the copying of the content. Lending ebooks involves copying, therefore it must be licensed by the copyright holder.
--edit-- also the fact that you can onmly ever transfer any data in electronic form by copying is an irrelevent implementation detail. The tech is there to transfer ownership, we are simply denied it by license.
And then the lending provisions. You could lend your kindle to someone (giving them all your books rather than just one). With a paper book you can give the book away or lend it to people in a serial fashion for however long you want. The tech is clearly there (single, two week lends) but the terms under which it operates are far more restrictive than a paper book.
--edit-- I realise that I first said ebooks and now am referring almost exclusively to amazon. It's entirely possible that other schemes could allow transfer of ownership relatively easily. I'm not aware of any that do right now, but there you are.
> Ebooks are computer code [...]. We don’t buy them, we lease them.
This implies that books aren't licensed but they are. The paper and glue isn't but the text is.
> It’s for this reason that we should stop using terminology like “bestseller lists” — when it really should be “most leased” lists
Why not do this for paper books too? The copyrighted content in them is under a license to you.
> Buyers of physical books can do whatever they want with them
No way. Can I photocopy the book and sell copies of it? No. Can I write my own book using the books characters? No. Can I sell large quantities of them into foreign markets? No. Can I lend it to multiple people simultaneously? No, at least not without copying it which isn't allowed.
> ebook distributors have radically changed the pricing from that of regular books. [...] For the physical book, libraries would pay $14.40 [and for the ebook] libraries would pay $78.
Is that really such a radical change though? As the article later notes a library might buy as many as 80 copies of a major bestseller, which in this case is $1152. Yet the e-book is only $78. In order to compare these two numbers we need to know how many times the ebook can be lent out simultaneously, but that number is missing...
> Random House [...] limits the number of check-outs per ebook. This means libraries have to lease another “copy” when they reach a certain threshold … as if the ebook had died or something.
Physical books will fall apart ("die") at some point, especially those paperback bestsellers. To make a fair comparison we need to know the ebook limit and the lifespan of a popular paperback, but those numbers are missing too...
> In fact, that’s the problem some authors have with ebooks — not just that they earn less money on them, but that “They never degrade. They are perpetual. That harms writers directly,”
It's a quote, but it contradicts the previous point! 'Ebooks are bad because they expire, no wait, ebooks are bad because the don't expire!' Which is it?
> These authors don’t mind the high prices charged to libraries because they don’t even like libraries to begin with. [...] books can be loaned out (for free!) many times, costing writers money from presumably lost sales.
Any evidence for this? It sounds a lot like the anti-piracy myth. Could people reading and talking about books perhaps boost sales? Do some authors in fact like libraries? Maybe they even spent some time there at some point?
> Most physical books in libraries aren’t tattered and worn out [...]
That's because the worn-out books have been shredded.
> Ebook consumers should be able to lend and resell ebooks the same way we do with physical books
Well, an ebook that is exactly like a physical book is an ebook that is artificially restricted to be lent out to one reader at a time. But that's what this article is arguing against. What exactly is the author advocating? What should an ebook be? That's the genuine question which goes unanswered.