Kurzweil Takes On Kindle With "Blio" E-Reader 168
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."
Re:Is this new? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Computer versus Kindle (Score:3, Informative)
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:One standard (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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:Does Kurzweil get the idea of an e-Reader? (Score:3, Informative)
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:Computer versus Kindle (Score:3, Informative)
E-Ink is still a helluva lot easier on the eyes than an LCD
Re:Great Idea shame it will fail though (Score:3, Informative)
Music labels still release albums on iTunes even though there is no longer any DRM on that system, etc.., etc...
FTFY
Re:Is this new? (Score:3, Informative)
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 [bartleby.com] 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:UTTERLY PATHETIC (Score:5, 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.
Re:PDF? (Score:3, Informative)
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? (Score:3, Informative)
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 [idpf.org] 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? (Score:3, Informative)
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.