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Ebook publishers & authors are going to have to figure out a way to allow this, because "share book with a friend" is deeply ingrained in literary culture. That it's currently quasi-legal at best (the fair use argument has to stretch pretty far to allow it), means it's mostly underground. Publishers & authors aren't able to get the benefit of new readers they way they always could from those who buy books at yard sales or get a friend's used copy. They have no way of knowing how far word-of-mouth support has gone, and no easy way of advertising to those people.
Publishers and ebook stores have worked very, very hard to convince people "it's just like a book! Except it's on your screen!" to get past the initial resistance people had; one of the consequences of "it's a book!" instead of "it's a digital file, like a bit of software, that you need our special text-reader program to run," is that people will try to treat it like a book. And books get shared.
I don't know what the solution is; there's no easy way to allow "sharing with up to 4 people." (Sharing every book with the same 4 people, all of whom use the same account, is not the same thing at all.) And sharing ebooks can cut into profits in ways that sharing pbooks generally doesn't.
But most people don't want to destroy their favorite author by removing all their profits; they don't want to distribute that book through 30 torrents to a thousand computers. They want to hand the book to their best friend when they're done reading it, just like they've always done for pbooks.
Attempting to make that a shameful immoral act will either (1) be ignored or (2) convince people that e-reading is obviously an entirely different action from "real reading."
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