Kurzweil Takes On Kindle With "Blio" E-Reader

kkleiner writes "Ray Kurzweil, prolific inventor and Singularity enthusiast, is planning to debut Blio at CES 2010. Blio is an e-reader platform, not hardware, that can be used on PC, Mac, iPhone and iPod touch. Developed by Kurzweil company knfb Reading, Blio preserves the original format of books including typography, and illustrations, in full color. It also takes advantage of knfb’s high quality text to speech capabilities and supports animation and video content."

Comments

Is this new?

[iamapizza]

There are already many other software based ereaders that exist, this one is just a bit more featured. Or am I being cynical again?

Re:Is this new?

[happy_place]

You mean like the free Acrobat Reader? No wait, that supports only PDFs. Really the main advantage of this e-reader is that unlike Kindle, it uses a full sized monitor AND your computer, is NOT portable, and since it's plugged into your wall, will last as long as the power's on in your house, as opposed to that dreadful Kindle that lasts upwards of 10-15 days battery life (when wifi's turned off). So there!

Re:Is this new?

[bcrowell]

You mean like the free Acrobat Reader? No wait, that supports only PDFs. Really the main advantage of this e-reader is that unlike Kindle, it uses a full sized monitor AND your computer [...]

TFA tries very hard to highlight the main advantage of Blio over Kindle. If you look at the very first screenshot in the article, it's a color illustration of a human skull from an anatomy textbook. This is an appplication that Kindle can't handle: illustrated textbooks. Kindle is black and white, has a page that's relatively small, doesn't usually (ever?) include illustrations, and doesn't have proper formatting for math.

I think the main advantage of Blio over PDF is this: "Like all e-readers, Blio will adopt some form of DRM and proprietary formatting [...]" Well, that's only an advantage in the publisher's eyes, but they do seem to see it as crucial.

I can also imagine certain categories of books where Blio could do something useful for the reader that can't be done as well by PDF. Consider a public-domain edition of Gray's Anatomy. You can get it here in html format. Now suppose you want to read it on the bus, without carrying a full-size laptop computer with you. If the Blio software is done well, it might adapt itself better to an e-book reader than html or pdf.

TFA says, "Kurzweil and knfb are working with Google to try to make their extensive catalog of printed materials available for Blio." Google is not in the same market as kindle. Amazon sells a relatively small number of recent, profitable books, each of which has to be formatted for the kindle. Google has a gigantic archive of old, public-domain books, none of which is a profitable item in and of itself, but which, aggregated, make something that google might be able to profit from. There is no way that google is going to bring out special e-book editions of all those books.

Re:Is this new?

[_KiTA_]

You mean like the free Acrobat Reader? No wait, that supports only PDFs.

Really the main advantage of this e-reader is that unlike Kindle, it uses a full sized monitor AND your computer, is NOT portable, and since it's plugged into your wall, will last as long as the power's on in your house, as opposed to that dreadful Kindle that lasts upwards of 10-15 days battery life (when wifi's turned off). So there!

Yes, because this will never ever be ported, ever, and the existence of this eReader, pushing technology forward, will not influence the Kindle 3 and Nook 2's features in any way.

I think the new toy in this (and it's Kurzweil, he ALWAYS has a neat toy in his stuff) that we should be paying attention to is that it has actually good Text to Speech, and it on-the-fly translates to 16 different languages . While neither are particuarly NEW technologies they are technologies that are:

1. Ripe for maturing (machine translation is getting better and better every year, for example)
2. World-changing if they get perfected.

The world changing thing I want to explain -- Kurzweil has already done something similar -- the first OCR + Text to Speech commercial application was the Kurzweil Reading Machine, back in 1976. 30 years later, those tabletop sized prototypes are now... hidden inside pen sized scanners. It kinda pushed forward Assistive Technology quite a bit, for the time -- before then, the only choice Blind people had to read things was braille. Now, with the right gadgets, they can read anything.

When you add on the fly translation to the mix, things get... interesting. Manga fans, for example, won't have to wait for translations, just click, click, bam, instant translations. You'll be able to subscribe to a French Newspaper, get it in the morning, auto translated, ready to go. And finally the US military can finally feel safe and justified in firing all those gay Arabic translators, cause they can finally be replaced by robots.

Technologies such as Vocaloid (an artificial pop star software kit... thing) put forth another idea -- combining this with Speech to Text. Automatic, in line translation of diplomatic speeches, news programs, and (of course), anime and entertainment, anyone?

In short, while as a bookreader it's pretty good (and it is, it looks a lot better than the Nook or Kindle PC apps)... I'm more excited about the translation tech inside it.

Computer versus Kindle

[jimbobborg]

My Brother-in-Law has a Kindle. The main reason he uses it is it's a lot easier to read text on the Kindle's LCD than on a computer LCD as there is no refresh rate on the Kindle. The screen refreshes only when you turn a page, which makes it easier on the eyes than a 60Hz computer LCD display.

Also, Blio on PC, Mac, iPhone and iPod touch, but no Linux? WTF?

Re:Computer versus Kindle

[itsme1234]

You're thinking CRT, LCDs are in this respect very similar to e-ink, they change only when you need them to change (i.e. there's no refresh while showing static images). There is a flicker if the backlight is fluorescent (as opposed to the new LED backlight present in many new notebooks and netbooks) but you get the same flicker if you look at anything (event a book) under fluorescent light (which most people tolerate quite well).

Re:Computer versus Kindle

[jgtg32a]

E-Ink is still a helluva lot easier on the eyes than an LCD

Re:Computer versus Kindle

[Bigjeff5]

God, you must have the worst case of ADD in history. Do you turn pages in a book and have enough time to think maybe your arm is broken because it took so long? Because that's about how long it takes, a normal page turn.

Even the old ones (I have a prs-500) only take a half second to turn the page, unless you are doing something funky like custom fonts and stuff like that. If yours was taking longer than that then you were probably using an oddly formatted book, or perhaps a pdf and the particular model you were using wasn't so great at them. The new ones I know are faster, I've seen them. In any case I've read a half dozen books on mine and never thought it was outrageously slow. Slower than an LCD, yes, but it's not an LCD, and it looks a hundred times better for print than an LCD.

For heaven's sake it's made to replace a book, you're not supposed to be spending much time on the book selection page, or digging around in the options, you're supposed to be reading a friggin book!

Dumbass.

Re:Computer versus Kindle

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can I find this color inversion setting? That sounds amazing...

Great Idea shame it will fail though

[RotateLeftByte]

Why fail?
  As is runs on a conventional PC the DRM will be hacks in hours if not days s othe publishers will pull their titles.
Then the patent tolls will fire up their pencils and sue this into oblivion. There are patents on reading a text already. I'm sure that every toll and their dogs will be out in force to get a bit of their action on this.

Sorry for being so negative but I feel sure that there are just too many vested interests to let this succeed.

Re:Great Idea shame it will fail though

[maxume]

The Kindle DRM scheme has been broken for months. Publishers don't seem to care (much).

Re:Great Idea shame it will fail though

[m.ducharme]

Music labels still release albums on iTunes even though there is no longer any DRM on that system, etc.., etc...

FTFY

One standard

[Enderandrew]

There are 50 million e-book formats and standards. What appeals to me about Kindle or Nook is that it is backed by a huge retailer. I feel fairly confident that if I buy a book from them, I can access it in the future. I know they will have a huge library of titles in their format. I feel strongly that they stand a chance to become the dominant standard. Kindle is opening themselves up to other devices and resellers. My wife has been buying books via the Kindle app on her iPhone.

Would I prefer a nice open standard with no DRM? Certainly. Will retailers ever support that? No.

Re:One standard

[cain]

I feel fairly confident that if I buy a book from them, I can access it in the future.

Don't be too sure about that. In a supremely ironic move, Amazon recently deleted Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles even though the books had been legally purchased. It's as if Amazon walked into your house and took books from your shelves, leaving a few bucks in their place. Being backed by a huge retailer makes me less confident that I'll be able t read the ebooks I purchase in the future.

Re:One standard

[vlm]

What appeals to me about Kindle or Nook is that it is backed by a huge retailer. I feel fairly confident that if I buy a book from them, I can access it in the future. I know they will have a huge library of titles in their format. I feel strongly that they stand a chance to become the dominant standard.

Sounds exactly like Circuit City's DIVX disks.... How'd that work out?

Re:One standard

[Enderandrew]

Divx was always a rental if I recall. You didn't have to worry about them sticking around, because you only had the rights to watch the disc once. Divx was designed to be a fairly disposable format.

Re:One standard

[MtHuurne]

They promised to never do it again, except in certain situations. This includes "judicial orders", so this means that if a government outlaws a book, they can not only prohibit future sales, but also make existing copies disappear. It also means that a copyright conflict could still cause a book to be removed, but only after a judge orders it.

Re:One standard

[hey!]

The whole ASCII only thing was one of the most brain dead decisions the Gutenberg ever made.

Many books go through the ASCII lobotomy relatively unscathed, of course, but there's lots of things ASCII just can't do. That's not just peripheral things like italics, boldface or underline. I'm talking about things you absolutely need to represent what is being said. It's foreign scripts like Greek. It's mathematical symbols -- no classic math books for Gutenberg. It's currency symbols other than '$'. It's common typographic symbols that didn't make the cut back in 1963 when they only had 128 code points and the main concern was driving low res dot matrix printers writing on 14" greenbar.

Basically Michael Hart conflated "non-ASCII" with proprietary document formats like WordPerfect. ASCII is literally incapable of representing the *information* in a wide variety of books without the adoption of some kind of ad hoc encoding scheme. That's in fact what a lot of Gutenberg texts do, which means they're somewhat unintelligible, which is the exact opposite of the policy's intent.

To be fair, PG came almost twenty years before Unicode. But the only reasonable solution would be to specify a simple file format that would have the following properties:

(1) If printed as 7 bit ASCII, most texts would be intelligible.

(2) Has a standard extension mechanism for specifying symbols, the way XML has character entities.

(3) Has standard representations for common typographic effects like boldface or document structure like footnotes.

It's not that hard to do, you just can't have 100% of everything. Maximizing the prettiness of ASCII printouts is not consistent with maximizing the intelligibility of documents. So you make the documents as intelligible as possible, and then as pretty as possible consistent with that.

Restructured Text does a pretty good job of representing a number of document structures and markup features found in HTML, while retaining a plain text representation that looks like what it means.

Um, that's great and all...

[Phroggy]

...but the Kindle is a hardware platform. It's the hardware that makes it compelling, not the software. If you don't care about the hardware, and are only interested in the content, then all you're really looking for is an alternative to Amazon's e-book store - not an alternative to the Kindle.

In fact, hold

PDF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations, you've invented Portable Document Format.

Re:PDF?

[shutdown -p now]

PDF sucks for e-books - it cannot be properly scaled to different screen sizes, as it doesn't reflow.

The de-facto established standard for e-books is now ePub, and it is reflowable, and has the proper metadata store with fields typically used for books.

Re:PDF?

[shutdown -p now]

Problem with automatic reflow-ability is widows and orphans, that book editors could and do remove from their paper (or pdf) works.

It seems to be trivial to write a layout algorithm that avoids having too few lines on a single page. I'm not sure, but I suspect TeX would have some already, so it could be just readily ported. I know that many PC e-book readers use TeX algorithms, too, and at least one hardware device (LBook).

In any case, if an automated solution does it right in 99% cases, I can live with the remaining 1%. It is a very minor inconvenience when compared to the ability to change font face and size at will, rather than being stuck with whatever the publisher liked most. Font size in particular is a huge issue for people with less than perfect eyesight.

he point of the "e-reader" is that the pages you get are identical to the print version

Where did you get that idea? No e-book reader that I've seen, neither a dedicated hardware device nor a software reader, has this as a design goal. Given that the screen has dimensions rather different from a typical book, and also given that font size has to be larger to be legible (since resolution is currently limited to ~170 DPI with eInk screens), any fixed-layout books would have to be specially produced for those readers, different versions for different screen sizes.

If you want reflow, then why not just have all books be in HTML, and have eReader just have a web-browser? (or how about html.gz if space is an issue?).

.html.gz isn't enough, as you also want to be able to package images with the book.

That said, EPUB effectively is a .zip file with book in XHTML 1.1 Strict + CSS 2.0 (or rather, a well-defined subset thereof, since you don't need it all for a book). The package also contains a separate XML file with its own schema for book metadata, and table of contents - the latter in particular is so that every reader can represent it in the way most convenient and accessible given its presentation constraints (screen size etc) - rather than just a bunch of nested lists with links.

Re:PDF?

[shutdown -p now]

Except that this "Blio" format touts as its big advantage that the pages look exactly like in the real book.

TFA is very light on details, and the official site isn't even there, but I don't see any actually mentions of a new, distinct, "Blio forma"t there - it actually sounds a lot like it's just going to use PDF, from a few choice quotes that actually mention any format by name:

You can even synchronize a PDF with an audio book to get read-along highlighting ... Kurzweil and knfb are working with Google to try to make their extensive catalog of printed materials available for Blio. They are also aiming to have major publishers port their books into PDF for free.

Then there's this in Wired article on the thing:

“We can take a PDF and an audio book and merge the two to get a combination such that you can hear the audio book and see the words highlighted on the PDF at the same time,”

So basically sounsd like a container (.zip?) holding .pdf + .mp3/.ogg/whatever.

Or am I missing something?

In any case, if they are really set on a fixed layout, that's yet another nail in the coffin. They say they want to put it on the (permanently) upcoming net-tablets - the Apple one, a likely bunch of Android devices, etc - and I do not expect those to all have the same screen resolution, to begin with. Furthermore, in practice, there are also heaps of netbooks that people already own and will want to use with that; again, a wide range of different screen sizes and resolutions there, distinct from tablets.

And in general:

big advantage that the pages look exactly like in the real book

Why is that even an advantage? I can understand wanting the pages to have the same quality as a printed book (as in typography), but that's a different matter altogether. And...

You can't reliably do that with reflowing.

TeX does get pretty close, doesn't it? I mean, I can take some LaTeX source, poke around with page size, and typically get a reflowed document of about the same quality. So maybe it does get 1% of things slightly wrong - will anyone except a typography expert actually notice? And even if they will, will they be bothered by it?

I suspect this will end in the same way as the CD vs tape/vinyl discussion: to hell with fidelity in minute detail, convenience always wins for the casual user.

Not new

[Shikaku]

Miss Blio wants to give you your future. Call me now for a free reading!

UTTERLY PATHETIC

[tjstork]

Famous self promoting futurist has plunged deep into his well of creativity to give us a Kindle Clone.

Re:UTTERLY PATHETIC

[John Whitley]

Blio is not a Kindle and that's the point. It's not tied to particular hardware, and as such is intended to work on a wide variety of platforms, including slate devices. And unlike Kindle and many other ebook formats, Blio has color, support for proper typography and layout, and more. Personally, I see the Kindle and many current competitors as devices that are like the pre-original-iPod MP3 players. Player UI often *sucked* for navigating even a tiny library of music, but hey, they were still kinda neat, right?

Whether Blio is "it" or not is irrelevant -- Kurzweil's idea is spot on, in that the current generation devices restrict the use of much of what we've learned over the centuries about how to present text and information.

Does Kurzweil get the idea of an e-Reader?

[oscarwumpus]

For a guy that is supposed to be a step ahead tech-wise, apparently he doesn't understand that people want a portable device that is easy to read. A laptop/ iPhone/ iPod is not an easy-to-read from device* so creating a reader for those devices doesn't really get rid of the initial problem of having to use those devices. Who reads a book on an iPod or phone?! Seriously? Do you carry around one of those magnifying screens from "Brazil"? *laptop...well, the problem is the back lighting and eye fatigue, not the screen size, necessarily.

Re:Does Kurzweil get the idea of an e-Reader?

[Halo1]

Who reads a book on an iPod or phone?! Seriously?

I do (iPod Touch). Initially mainly from Baen/Webscription.net, nowadays also a lot from Project Gutenberg. It's mainly a lot easier to carry around than library books. I basically stopped going to the public library since I started reading this way.

Do you carry around one of those magnifying screens from "Brazil"?

Actually, it works surprisingly well for me (I'm 30). A colleague of mine, who's in his early fifties, can't read the text without scaling it to the point where you have so little text on a screen that it becomes useless though.

Re:Does Kurzweil get the idea of an e-Reader?

[YourExperiment]

Horses for courses, my friend. Complain all you like about the size of a smartphone or the screen quality of a laptop, but I'm not going to carry around a dedicated piece of hardware just to read books on. I already have a smartphone that does the job almost as well right here in my pocket, and that's good enough for me.

Re:Does Kurzweil get the idea of an e-Reader?

[pilgrim23]

I recall reading Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad on a Newton. To this day a Kindle is the only machine with a screen the size of a Newton (which is portable) but lacks one feature. a green back light. I STILL occasionally use my Newton 2000 to read books and many Pub Domain books are still available in Newton package format. Of course I also read...books.. you know paper, has a cover. fits easy int he lap...

meh

[Ephemeriis]

From the fine article:

By focusing on the software, and not trying to maintain a hardware device, Kurzweil hopes to provide the most versatile, life-like electronic version of print books and enhance them with multimedia.

The first problem with this approach is that there's no physical device. Books are physical, portable objects. This software may be wonderful and all, but it still lives in a computer. I've read ebooks for literally years, and I was never happy with the computer-based ereader software. I always preferred reading on something small and portable like a PDA than on my PC. Laptops are better than a desktop PC, but still not as good as a book. Netbooks are closer still, but not quite there.

So you've got a beautiful, life-like electronic version of a print book... And it is stuck on your computer. I'm not impressed.

The next problem is that he's trying to enhance the books with multimedia.

Anyone remember when CD-ROMs were just going mainstream? Remember all the multimedia encyclopedias that were available? Remember how cool it was to look up an article on something and be able to watch a video or hear a speech or something? Yeah... Notice how those have pretty much stopped being popular?

Sure, it might be handy to have good text-to-speech in an ereader... And there are certainly some books that would benefit from a good dose of multimedia content... But, for the most part, I don't think many books are going to benefit from any of this.

There is a reason why classes - even highly visual/interactive ones like science labs - require textbooks. They can spell things out clearly and concisely, complete with diagrams and formula - which words and video can't accomplish as neatly.

There is a reason why I read books instead of going to the movies - well-written text and a healthy imagination can produce better visuals than anything in Hollywood.

This is nothing special.

[dwiget001]

I have been reading using "ABOOK" for many years now.

1. Long battery life, in fact, it is so advanced, that it doesn't even have "batteries", in the traditional sense.

2. Sure, you have to manipulate the "pages" by hand, but only when you need to turn the page.

3. Heck, I can even loan it to people or, if I am feeling very generous, I can just give "ABOOK" away, whether to friends, family members or the local library.

4. ...

5. PROFIT!!!!

"ABOOK" is a sure WEINNAR!

Stupid names

[Foolicious]

Why do all these products have such stupid names? Brio, Treo, Kindle, Nano, Vaio, blah blah blah. It's like there's a council somewhere that approves product names based only on how gadgety and futuristic they sound, but under the assumption that in the future product names will only end with vowel sounds.

iPods are superb e-readers

[fyngyrz]

Who reads a book on an iPod or phone?

I do. All the time. And I own a hardware Kindle, too. But the Kindle app on the iPod Touch is *much* better (brighter, faster, lighter, better contrast, less eye movement, easier to hold, works in the dark, no ghosting, totally one-handed use, tons more storage.) Of the five font sizes, I use the three smallest depending on how much movement is going on. Passenger in a car, middle size. Late at night, still in bed, I use the smallest size. Otherwise, the next to smallest size. While I'm reading, my iPod Touch is checking my email, my chess games, my Words with Friends games (similar to Scrabble), allows me instant access to the weather, checks my servers to make sure they're all up and accessible, basically all kinds of apps, plays my favorite music for me, fits in my pocket, handles LOTS of other e-reader formats including PDF, in full color... downside? I have to charge it about once a day... which doesn't stop me from using it, it just temporarily (and vaguely) tethers me to the car, couch, desk or bed. Big whoop.

This is why I don't even bother with the hardware Kindle. It's also why I'm very interested to see what Apple does with the hopefully forthcoming tablet. Not holding my breath after the no-camera, no-GPS iPod non-release last cycle, but one can hope. :)