The frustrating way we borrow e-books today
One of the early pioneers in the digital lending space was Overdrive, Inc., which developed the e-book lending systems used by most libraries today. Overdrive uses the same Adobe DRM (Digital Rights Management) scheme as Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, and Google Books to protect files from piracy and manage the lending period of library e-books. That system was first devised for E Ink e-readers and the method for loading e-books onto those devices is about the same now as it has been since 2009