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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."
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?
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.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
...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
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Miss Blio wants to give you your future. Call me now for a free reading!
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!
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.
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.