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Kurzweil Takes On Kindle With "Blio" E-Reader

Posted by timothy on from the free-as-in-what-exactly dept.

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."

3 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Great Idea shame it will fail though by RotateLeftByte · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  2. Re:One standard by cain · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:UTTERLY PATHETIC by John+Whitley · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.