The currently-legal way to lend (or resell) ebooks is to swap around the hardware;
Capitol v. ReDigi's recent ruling includes a bit on p. 13:
Quote:
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Section 109(a) still protects a lawful owner’s sale of her “particular” phonorecord, be it a computer hard disk, iPod, or other memory device onto which the file was originally downloaded.
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Download your ebooks onto flash drives or memory cards *first.* Non-DRM'd ones can be legally sold, as long as the card itself changes hands. (DRM'd ones can be sold, but they're pretty useless without a crack, and the cracked version might be legal for personal use but isn't legal to sell. However, if there's a way to offer cracking info--like a PID number--along with the locked books, that would presumably not violate copyright law, although the DMCA starts getting wonky around that.)
This contradicts many sites' TOS, which say that the books cannot be transferred even by handing the device to someone else--but that's a matter of contract agreement, not copyright law.
Hmm. Maybe I should start buying ebooks, loading 10 or 20 at a time onto small memory cards, and selling the cards on ebay. As it is, most of my purchases are first loaded onto a portable drive, so I'll keep in mind that I can remove my *other* data and just sell the drive if I want to sell the ebooks.
Possibly, I can give away the drive; the new owner of the drive can copy the books they want to their own hardware (because copies for personal use are acceptable), and they can hand off the drive to someone else when they're done. The courts have never made a ruling about, for example, a magazine being handed around among friends, wherein each of them photocopies a favorite page or two to keep.