It used to be (40 years ago?) that US pharmacies would rent bestsellers. This was back when public libraries just bought the books they thought they needed for their permanent collection, so their wait times for current bestsellers were enormous -- if they even allowed such reserves.
Then the libraries started renting multiple copies of bestsellers to better align with patron demand. This commercial web page gives some of the history of the switch from drug stores to libraries:
http://www.brodartbooks.com/why-brod...ge.aspx?id=374
Quote:
The librarian asked if she could lend the titles and offered to collect the drugstore's books that were still in circulation. The library would collect any money it could and McNaughton would permit book loans, free.
A month later, McNaughton found that the receipts from the drugstore's customers were amazingly high. He concluded that storekeepers had been cheating him but that librarians were honest.
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Not too many people have the level of integrity librarians do. How this fits into the prospects for eBook rentals hopefully does not need to be spelled out.
The textbook eBook loan prices I have seen are higher than widely used schemes where you buy the book used and then sell it back to the book store at the end of the semester. Unless someone comes up with stronger DRM, or non-librarian human nature changes, I can't see eBook rental prices of a dollar or two.