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The more I think about it, the more the stuff about casual sharing pisses me off. One way that books are way, way different from music is that books are typically used once where music files are used often. Sure, there are some books that I'll read several times over, and sometimes I'll go back and reread a series if I've had to wait a while for the latest book to come out. But the vast majority of the books I've read, I've read exactly once.
For that vast majority of books (pbooks, at least), I'm happy to lend them to friends - sometime many friends - and I'm often not too disturbed if the book comes back damaged or gets lost or whatever. I'll probably never read it again anyways.
And the fact that I can't read that pbook while it's gone isn't a factor. I don't want to.
The change in my average consumption of an ebook would negligible whether or not I had to delete it (or lock it out) or not from my own devices while it was lent out or flat out given to someone else. After the initial read, 99% of the time I don't even care if I've still got the ebook in my library or not.
As far as I can tell, an ebook, to be priced at anything more than a small fraction of the cost of a pbook has to have the same abilities as a pbook. And that means transferring it (for free or not) to someone else.
Now I'm rambling, but I think I made a stab at a point somewhere in there.
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