Read everything everywhere with 1 login. Book industry works on central ebook platform

It's still kind of a secret, but the website is already online. Without reference to the people behind it, but then again, we know that. So we can break the news: it CPNB (that book week club) collaborates with the booksellers and publishers on a revolutionary platform for ebooks. This project, titled 'Leesid' should put an end to the chaos of DRM-shit, lots of different readers and tablets and bizarre ownership rules the Dutch electronic book reader still has to live with.

According to a source at CPNB, it is about a digital bookcase that works on all possible platforms. So you no longer need a Book Globe needed for your books from bol.com, and no Kindle for your purchases at Amazon, and no Kobo for yet other ebooks. And you also don't risk one person's device eating the books you bought from the other. Or that you suddenly lose your books because the seller has decided at you don't handle them properly, or that you read them in the wrong country, as happens with Google's books.

[Tweet "Leesid becomes an app where the books you download actually become your property"]

Leesid is supposed to be an app where the books you download actually become your property, and also remain available for you to read forever, for life. There are still some snags, of course. Because not all big foreign publishers and retailers are eager to join in. They still think you as a reader are an unreliable sujest, who for the price of a paper book only gets a kind of loan of the digital version. Thought the record industry used to get away with it too.

This will be different, it seems. After all, a big advantage of the Dutch market is that there is already a lot of cooperation, so the development of the app does not have to cost that much time and money. After all, you still pay at the original seller. Now all we have to do is drop that price, because the diesel for the truck no longer needs to be paid.

Main question for us, as customers, is: can you now gift your ebook again, or even resell it second-hand, as you can with paper books? They haven't quite figured that out yet. At the CPNB.

 Surely, we see this as a very firm step in the right direction. What do you think? Is leesid the Egg of Columbus for the book industry? Comment in the comments.