Edukindle has a comprehensive article on this today. It discusses:
sharing ebooks among devices on one account
lending ebooks to someone not on the same account
library lending of ebooks
So, those are your choices. As I survey the landscape, it seems to me that these strategies offer differing value to educators, so I have ranked them here for your consideration:
Lending and Borrowing (books among all users) – value to educators? 4 out of 10
Sharing (books among devices on one account)– value to educators? 8 out of 10
Library Lending (books to patrons of the library) – value to educators? 9 out of 10
This information is the subject of a 30-minute webinar, which you can view by clicking here.
The article’s title… “Beg, Borrow, But Please Don’t Steal”… is telling. Obviously everyone wants students to have access to all the materials they need. But the reality is that some students will share materials beyond what is considered permissible, just because they can, and no one admonishing them to “please not steal” is going to stop them.
I think that, instead of trying to control and revise lending systems, schools need to be making new arrangements with publishers to make sure all school-required materials are simply available to all, making lending moot and establishing schools as “fair use” institutions for all students (or establishing “school accounts” for the students, allowing them to access school material on any device registered to that account).
It is about time that schools and colleges abandon the ridiculous book pricing scam and adopt a class material system based on freely available material, and let teachers deliver that along with their own in-class notes.