It sounds like they're just now figuring out that the "cloud" is not the deep-space vacuum they hoped it would be.
If they have to keep track of everybody's purhcase licenses for books for all time, that cloud is going to evaporate very quickly.
They're probably hoping that this "rental" concept will be accepted by the marketplace, and then they won't have to keep people's ownership records forever, just to let them access the "books" whenever they want.
-PJ
I think they would see their market drop off dramatically, unless it was maybe a 10 year rental.
The numbers of books available are not great, but they have lending libraries for electronic books now. I just rented and read one this past week. For free.
I also have been able to rent my last two books for college classes. They aren’t classes that I needed to keep the books for beyond the class, so I really liked the reduced fee and not needing to keep up with the book or resell it.
“They’re probably hoping that this “rental” concept will be accepted by the marketplace, and then they won’t have to keep people’s ownership records forever, just to let them access the “books” whenever they want.”
To be clear, there is not even an option to rent books on Amazon or B&N. They know such a thing would never fly.
With either device, you can “loan” your e-books to someone else with a device in the same family for two weeks.
I do hope good crack software comes along so we can save non-DRM copies of our books in our backups. That way their fate isn’t tied to the entity that sold them to us.