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Originally Posted by Dave W
my ebook purchase should be exactly like a paper book purchase. That is, when I am through with it, I can lend or give it to a friend to read. I can even sell it at a flea market or give it to my local library.
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While I can appreciate your feelings, I disagree that an ebook should be "exactly" like paper, as ebooks have several advantages that you cannot get via paper. For example, I can back up my ebooks and store the data files in multiple locations. I can purchase an ebook, receive it immediately, and not pay shipping. I can get a sample chapter, at a minimal cost to the retailer and publisher, and peruse it at my leisure, etc etc.
By the way, do you expect your word processor to have the exact same strengths and weaknesses as a typewriter?
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Originally Posted by Dave W
Why can't a publisher sell a card with a book or series of books burned into the flash memory?
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Because it negates a major cost advantage of ebooks -- namely that you don't have to produce 10,000 physical objects with a plastic enclosure and a 4-color printed wrapper, distribute it to stores, hope someone actually buys it, and destroy it if no one purchases it. It's a major step backwards, akin to putting MP3's on a physical CD.
Besides, paper books are not going away any time soon. Even if ebooks completely dominate the market, I have no doubt that in the worst case scenario various print-on-demand options will be available for a long time to come. So I expect that for the duration of your lifetime, you will be able to give your friends paper books as gifts.
As to loaning and reselling ebooks, there already are some library ebook programs that loan out a limited number of copies for a limited time. Hopefully this will gain more traction as ebooks become more common, in which case it will partially restore the lost "loan a book" functionality.
On an individual level, adding the ability to loan or resell will raise the cost of the ebooks, since you would have to add another level of infrastructure to the process. It would also (as already mentioned above) involve a level of connectivity which some users would reject.
I've also found that selling books is in most (but not all) cases a very small advantage; you're lucky to get
10¢ on the dollar for a used book. Eliminating the used market is a boon for publishers (especially in education), but given how thin margins are in this industry, and how little you typically get for a used book, I find it hard to get worked up about it.
So while I do hope that the "loaning" functionality can be restored (via library access), I certainly do not and will not miss physical packaging, and am willing to live with the loss of reselling ebooks.