Putting on my rose colored glasses for a possible way to eliminate Overdrive (and rearrange the quote from eschwartz for relative points) ...
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Originally Posted by eschwartz
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Which you cannot do with ebooks, unless you want to start your own extremely expensive DRM fulfillment platform. (Or lease Adobe's which is still expensive plus is controlled by a corporation that scares me more than OverDrive does.)
... building your own ebook library frontend (because I don't know of any libraries that actually wrote their own cataloging software, they usually purchase it from the handful of vendors who write library cataloging software for a living and sell it to hundreds/thousands of libraries), writing an app (and excluding E-Ink) if you went without Adobe...
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Although a hurdle, it seems as coming up with an alternative lending DRM scheme doesn't seem insurmountable.
The scheme itself should be trivial, it doesn't have to be good, since most people don't know about DRM and don't care.
As for the software, start a kickstarter or some open project, endowment, ... or get government funding. Eink implementation may be a problem, but Android and IOS apps should be doable.
I'm not sure it would need to be "extremely expensive".
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Then personally negotiate with publishers, storing ebooks you have purchased, ...
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If the publishers/distributors don't want to provide the ebooks, have Congress pass a law that allows libraries (and their agents) to strip DRM and a law that allows libraries to lend ebooks; a library could than purchase the ebooks from Amazon, Kobo, ...
It all seems very doable to me... if we want it.