Good to have your company, Art. The problem you're facing in sharing ebooks with friends and family is that they are often padlocked by a detestable piece of software called DRM (Digital Rights Management).
My own wee house and several other publishers see this imposition as an inconvenience -- indeed a downright insult - to honest buyers and a blatant infringement on their right of ownership. (It in no way deters piracy, as is claimed, it serves merely to encourage multiple buys of the same title by a single customer.) The number of houses adopting this anti-DRM view is growing.
You will find that your Kobo's ideal partner is Calibre Library software (free download here:
http://www.calibre-ebook.com) Thousands of us here at MobileRead and another million ebook readers worldwide swear by it.
One or two extra features worth noting is that Calibre offers a section called 'Open Books' in which DRM-free publishers and titles are listed. By making sure you buy or get free (from the MobileRead Library for instance) only DRM-free ebooks, you can easily convert them to other formats using Calibre at a couple of mouse clicks. Takes seconds. And you can read your books on any device you own and easily share them.
When you've read a book on your Kobo, you can delete it to save overloading the device and risk slowing its performance. The title remains in your Calibre Library (with a capacity for thousands of titles) for another upload to your device in thirty seconds whenever you want a re-read.
There is a way to strip DRM from ebooks, but -- no matter how morally justifiable some of us feel it to be -- it remains illegal, so we can't discuss it here. There are, however, instructions all over the net if you have the patience to follow them (I don't possess that quality).
Happy trouble-free Koboing and very best wishes. Neil