It’s one of the most meticulously covered stories of the moment, except for one its more particularly disturbing implications:  Amazon‘s announcement that it has “licensed the right to lend digital versions of all seven volumes in J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series in the U.S.” — meaning that people who have ponied up $79 to join the Amazon Prime cult — is a huge step forward in the privitization of the American public library system.

Take the Wall Street Journal‘s report on it: No where does it so much as mention the idea. Its lede, in fact, despite having no information at all about the deal (publicly-traded Amazon is, as usual, giving out no information), focuses on the deal as “a sign of its [Amazon’s] willingness to continue funding its e-book lending library despite the costs.”

As if no one knew Amazon was willing to lose gazillions to smash anyone it saw as standing in its way to controlling a market. What’s weird is that no one is saying that in this instance, the outfits its looking to smash are public libraries and the market it wants to monopolize is the public lending system that used to be free.

Here’s the core deal, as the Journal report details it:

Harry Potter fans who subscribe to Amazon Prime will be able to read the e-book editions of the best-selling series free starting June 19th. As is the case for other titles offered in the lending program, titles will be available on a once-a-month basis to owners of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader who have also embraced Amazon Prime. For $79 a year, subscribers to Amazon Prime get unlimited two-day shipping for no extra charge plus access to a digital library of TV shows and movies—as well as ebooks on loan.

A very brief New York Times report, too, seems written for stockholders: it, too, emphasizes the sincerity of Amazon’s investment, quoting Amazon head Jeff Bezos cooing that this is “the kind of significant investment in the Kindle ecosystem that we’ll continue to make on behalf of Kindle owners.”

At least the WSJ report gives some indication of another ugly side of the story — that is, that Amazon is otherwise stocking its anti-library with books that it has essentially forced little publishers to supply it with, because none of the big six publishers would agree to sell it books for lending. As the Journal report details,

When Amazon launched its digital lending library last November, some publishers willingly joined in and made their titles available. However, the country’s six largest publishers, which sold their digital books via the “agency pricing model” in which they control the consumer retail price, declined to participate, and their books weren’t included.

Other publishers also objected. But because their e-books were sold via the traditional wholesale pricing model, Amazon was able to include their titles in the lending library and treat each copy lent as an additional sale, paying the publishers accordingly.

Thus, those publishers who are not selling to Amazon via the agency model — which is to say, nearly every publisher in America — and, if the Department of Justice has its way, every publisher in America — are getting screwed.

No sooner does the Journal mention that, however, than it goes back to rhapsodizing about the size of Amazon’s investment in its lending program, citing one “financial analyst,” for example, who declares “that Amazon’s commitment to the lending library suggests the program is paying for itself in terms of additional book sales and the sales of unrelated merchandise that consumers may purchase when they return to the site to borrow a book.”

No it doesn’t. As I mentioned earlier, Amazon has showed a death-grip determination to dominate despite losing hundreds of millions of dollars in the past, and as it never reveals pertinent sales information, there’s simply nothing to justify such speculation, and it’s still arguable that the company is even making money, even though it’s got cash flow of Biblical proportions.

What’s not a guess, though, is that as our library system and publishers try to figure out how to best make ebooks available to library patrons, the damage Amazon is doing to the system is getting more and more severe … and no one seems to even be noticing.