Kindling a further interest?

It was about a year ago that I posted a fairly negative comment about e-books, but one aspect which did somewhat attract me was the concept of the e-book lending library.  The idea is that instead of having to physically go to your local library and look for books, you would go to their web site, search for the book you wanted and then download it onto your e-book reader.  And the really neat part of all this is that you wouldn't have to worry about remembering to take your book back or face the possibility of a fine, because the book would be automatically deleted from your reader once the loan period was up.  Brilliant!  But wait - it seems that publishers are not keen on the idea and are threatening to restrict or withdraw access to the e-books they publish.  This needs sorting out - not least because libraries, like all public services, are going to have to make significant savings, and web-based e-book lending would be an obvious way of achieving some savings.