Remember libraries? Back when people used to read paper versions of books, you could walk down to the corner library and borrow as many books as you wanted for a month or so, for free. Assuming you didn’t return them late and wind up owing the library a bunch of nickels, it was a pretty sweet system. Alright, obviously both hard-copy books and libraries are still around. In fact, according to some recent news, libraries have teamed up with Sony to make a nifty end-run around the Kindle, and the eCommerce model of eBook distribution.

If you buy a Kindle you can get some free books. But most of them will cost you somewhere around $9.99 when you buy them from Amazon. Substantially cheaper than buying most books at the store, but not exactly free. Enter the Sony Daily Edition Reader and OverDrive.com. The SDER is Sony’s newest Kindle competition. It’s coming out in December, and should set you back about $400. But the big news with the new reader is their very clever cross-marketing partnership with  OverDrive.com, which is, among other things, a “Digital Library Reserve”. That means it provides download services for over 9,000 public libraries in the US…libraries that, in some cases, carry huge collections of eBooks that you can digitally borrow for weeks at a time, at a cost of $0.

If consumers start seeing the value in getting their eBooks for free, it could spell trouble for Amazon and the Kindle. I’m not going to lose any sleep worrying that Amazon will crumble, but it could definitely impact their eBook sales. Traditionally, one of the knocks against libraries is that you don’t get to keep the book. And, as the many bookshelves that line our walls attest, we love hanging onto books. But with eBooks, there’s no real fun in owning them after you’ve read them. You can’t display an eBook version of Ulysses on the shelf to impress dinner guests. And so why pay for one if you can get it for free, instantly, from the library?

When I was reading about all this, I did have a thought. What will be really interesting is when some clever librarian decides to start lending out popular music mp3s and digital versions of video games…