If you buy a physical book, you have a right to lend it for free or re-sell it (first-sale doctrine). The publishers want to establish a precedent that you cannot do the same thing with digital books: the library must buy a special license and pay for every reading.
So this is about stripping people from their rights regarding to books made with a new technology.
It's not the same thing. When you give a book to someone else, you lose a physical object and they gain one. To "give" an ebook to someone, you have to copy it. We have a whole body of law about when it's OK to copy things.
IA allowed to read books throught the website so no copies are made. When lending a book through file download they used DRM to prevent reading after the lending term ends.
I'm sorry to have to disagree with you here but in fact every page of a book you show inside of a web browser is under the law a copy of that page of the original book.
When you look at a book you make a copy on your retina (if you want to reduce to absurd).
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> When you give a book to someone else, you lose a physical object and they gain one.
But you don't lose your recollection of the book contents.