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I don't see why you 'need' to be able to copy and share all books. If I write a book, I should be entitled to fair (and exclusive) profit from it, for a span of time. The length of that span of time is debatable (most countries have some sort of 'life of the author plus X years' arrangement, and the length of that X years is perhaps overly long) but certainly for fiction, where no lives will be altered or saved by its copyright status, I see no reason why the author should not have fair protection.
I do think that after this fair protection is up, the work *should* revert to the public domain simply because no work in created in isolation and as the author drew on the work of those who came before him or her, so should others be allowed to draw on their work later, as part of our pool of common human culture. On that, I wholeheartedly agree and do not support perpetual copyright forever. But as I said, I do think a reasonable term (again, open for debate on length) is perfectly fair.
With that said, I was taking your query as a serious one and not simply 'all information wants to be free' and thinking of situations---like the two I mentioned---where a common good really would be served by the government or whomever stepping in and saying wait a minute, you should NOT be able to hold the strings on that one.' A true situation where 'eminent domain' might apply to intellectual property.
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