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Originally Posted by rwe
does the same apply to an ebook that i have legally bought, can i give this away without restrictions as well ?
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There aren't many places that let you legally "buy" mass market ebooks. DRM, backed up by laws making it illegal to decrypt it, convert purchases into long term rentals. It isn't just that they've worked around the first sale doctrine, but also that when one generation of software and formats disappears, millions of dollars of old content is going to be (more legally than technically usually) trapped in obsolete formats. If you don't believe me, have a conversation with the portion of my music collection that is trapped in .rax (conversions so far have obliterated sound quality -- so an actual tech issue there).
MP3s mostly got freed because DRM had served its purpose for iTunes. Jobs didn't need DRM anymore because had already exploited it to get people to adopt his store and use it habitually, and so he was able to graciously remove the restrictions and now you can actually buy digital music. I had, before the iPad and the success of the Nook, hoped that Amazon would be on a similar path of reaching such success that they could afford to be gracious. But since the market is still anyone's game, DRM is going to be around for a while. Not to prevent piracy, but to help lasso and retain customers (and to get you to 'buy' the same content, over and over again).
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Originally Posted by HarryT
The problem is not the lending it, but the making unauthorised copies of it. Nobody is going to object if you lend someone your ebook reader containing your one and only copy of the book;
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And every other book you own. They will complain if you transfer your one and only copy to another person leaving no copy behind for yourself (so you aren't deprived of your reading hardware and entire library), because to do so typically requires removing DRM that ties the book to one account, which is illegal even without duplication. That isn't ownership.