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."
Great Idea shame it will fail though (Score:5, 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.
Um, that's great and all... (Score:4, Insightful)
...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? (Score:2, Insightful)
Congratulations, you've invented Portable Document Format.
Re:Great Idea shame it will fail though (Score:2, Insightful)
The Kindle DRM scheme has been broken for months. Publishers don't seem to care (much).
Re:One standard (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't be too sure about that. In a supremely ironic move, Amazon recently deleted [nytimes.com] 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.
UTTERLY PATHETIC (Score:2, Insightful)
Famous self promoting futurist has plunged deep into his well of creativity to give us a Kindle Clone.
Does Kurzweil get the idea of an e-Reader? (Score:2, Insightful)
meh (Score:3, Insightful)
From the fine article:
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.
Re:Computer versus Kindle (Score:3, Insightful)
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:One standard (Score:3, Insightful)
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.