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Well, it is a license but right now it is a license that is vaguely limited to the lifetime of the buyer. Publishers have tried to take on limiting Public Libraries before but everytime they do they come out smelling like horse manure.
I know that the common wisdom on Amazon is to leave your log-in and password to an heir and they will then be able to log-in on your death and take control of your books - but I suspect that 1. Somewhere along the line most Amazon log-ins and passwords will die out and 2. If a large number of people did keep accounts goings for decades and decades amassing thousands of books, the retailer at some point would have a valid legal stance in saying "sorry, that license was sold to your Great Grandmother and expired upon her death."
That all remains to be worked out.
Libraries on the other hand don't die, at least not in the sense that people die. They at least theoretically can hold onto the ownership of those books for the entire lifetime of the copyright, and then well past. That book is never going to be lost, stolen or destroyed and the library will never have to buy it again --- totally damaging the revenue stream of those Penguin Classics 7th graders check-out for their book reports.
The last time I looked into it Amazon was telling Public Libraries that they could purchase Kindles and start buying books on an Amazon account to loan out to patrons, but they were refusing to put that policy in writing. In other words, the literary equivalent of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
I strongly suspect that Amazon at this time is not in favor of alerting the Publishers to the fact that when people/libraries buy a digital book, it is more than possible that single copy of the book could supply a couple of generations (or a couple generations of an entire town) with the reading of that book for a very long time.
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