No, lending is not the same or near the same as piracy.

Piracy is a 1 to many circumstance.  I take a perfect copy, make a duplicate of it, and give it to someone else.  In piracy you eliminate the proposition of first sale all together.  In otherwords you violate the content owner's right to first sale.

Lending is a right affirmed in Common Law going back several centuries and further affirmed in more recent legal rulings.  Lending is the temporary transfer of the content and the right of use from the person who owns the right to the content to someone who doesn't.  There is no resale and there is no ownership of the material/content by the person to whom the content was lent.

The benefit of a library is supposed to be the access to a wide array of books, typically out of print, but also recent and new.  The problem is the modern library doesn't have that capacity. 

I don't necessarily agree with libraries having media like movies, TV shows, video games, or music.  Mostly because libraries are meant to be a source for knowledge.  They also became a source of entertainment, but considering reading is such a vital skill that should be learned and there is neither skill or knowledge in listening to Radio Head or watching SpongeBob Squarepants, I really don't think books as entertainment can be compared to videos, games, and music cds.

That all said.  I think the benefits of a lending library outweigh the drawbacks and they have been debated for centuries before antiquity.  You know what, if back then when books were far more expensive and every sale counted, and they still decided they were a valuabe thing, then I say keep em.

Why? they are useful for the local communities, especially children. And not everyone can afford to buy books all the time. Also most people only read them once and get rid of them after that. Might as well just let people to continue to borrow physical goods, just as they always have.