Ebooks kill things like book crossing (http://www.bookcrossing.com/)

I'm going to spend thousands on books over the rest of my life, and it's very frustrating that I won't be able to leave those to my family when I die. Unless I break the law to remove DRM.

FYI: The company I work for does e-books in a fairly niche market and while we do have DRM, we have mechanisms in place to transfer ownership relatively painlessly. The fact that Amazon etc don't make that simple is not per se intrinsic to e-books.

That actually sounds very good. A relatively easy transfer-of-ownership thing is what's missing for me in the ebook world. It would allow ebooks to be part of small office-based libraries, or lent between friends, these are good things.

Is there anything stopping her from just lending her Kindle? If lending is important to your mother, and she would like the convenience of ebooks, why not buy two Kindles: one for reading and one for lending?

Kindle is "smart" enough not to let the same book be read on multiple devices, which mimics physical books (you can't read a book that is not in your physical possession). Kindles are cheap, too. After about a dozen books or so you might actually save money even with a loaner Kindle.

I'm not disagreeing with you regarding the absurdity of ebook DRM, though. If you don't feel Kindles are ethically defensible, don't recommend them. If it's a convenience thing however, the two Kindle scheme might work for your mother.

>> Is there anything stopping her from just lending her Kindle?

Yes, a kindle is an expensive electronic device. The books are lent without any real expectation of getting them back, certainly without time limit. She receives from others, some books are returned, some passed on.

To effectively mimic that social pattern you would need one kindle per book, massively expensive (ebooks are seldom cheaper and the you have the device on top), environmentally unsound and just a really bad idea.

I think the fear is because of its digital format, ebooks can be lent en masse to unlimited numbers of people. Maybe there can be some sort of built-in transfer mechanism that would allow shared ebooks to temporarily leave the possession of its original owner to appear in the lender's presence. That emulates real-world books. Or would that be DRM?

You can lend Kindle books.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

Some books. For two weeks. Once. Far, far inferior to paper.