This weekend, Tim Carmody at Wired had a summation of the Blio Windows app’s first few days and the flak it’s taken from reviewers. It reportedly suffers from accessibility problems and text-to-speech conversion issues. Kurzweil has responded that the app was still undergoing improvements and a revised version will be released next month. An iOS 4 version is still in private beta. Carmody also mentions the controversy over Blio’s use of Feedbooks feeds without permission, and the fact that the Toshiba Blio store only has a little over half the titles of the main Blio store for reasons...

Got the following email from Phil Keeler: Is there a way to do this with Calibre or any other conversion program you know about? ...

Engadget reports on a press release concerning Blio, Ray Kurzweil’s imitation-of-a-paper-book e-reading app that we have mentioned a few times in past months. The PC application will be released for download starting September 28th, and iOS and Android applications will be available soon afterward. Blio will, the press release claims, “revolutionize the digital reading experience with full-color, interactive, and immersive content.” The full-color reader will read files presented in XPS format, “which allows digital books to stay true to their original print version,” and will also read EPUB files. It will also offer text-to-speech technology, Blio...

Of all things, who would expect Toshiba to open an ebook store, but they are going to. They will use Blio as their engine. From the Toshiba site: The Toshiba Book Place will launch in the coming weeks, offering you today’s best-sellers, as well as a range of cookbooks, travel guides, children’s books, textbooks and much more. Better yet, if Book Place is preloaded on your new Toshiba laptop, a sample of complimentary books is available for you to browse right now! Windows PCs come loaded with so much stuff nowadays, why not an ereader?...

The demonstrations I've seen of Blio are very, very impressive. Now here's another press release for you today: Baker & Taylor is proud to include F+W Media's books on Blio, which provides readers with a full-color, 3-D, interactive e-reading experience," said Tom Morgan, Chairman and CEO of Baker & Taylor. "Together with publishers like F+W, Baker & Taylor is committed to delivering to book lovers the content they want, in the format and on the devices of their choice."...

Ashlee Vance at the New York Times “Bits” technology blog has a brief article about Ray Kurzweil’s new “Blio” e-book system. It apparently will consist of downloadable software for most desktop and handheld devices, that will enable them to read e-books sold through Kurzweil’s Blio store. Mr. Kurzweil argued that the existing e-readers and tablets had limitations in the text formats they support and the way they handle the original images and layouts in printed texts. Blio preserves the original formatting, making it particularly attractive to publishers of things like cookbooks, how-to guides, schoolbooks, travel...

Like other happy owners of the iPad, I think that the critics should try the machine---ideally with more than a quick hands-on at an Apple Store or Best Buy. No, the LCD isn’t optimal for outdoor reading. But I myself read mostly inside and dislike the text-to-background contrast of the current E Ink. And as for the iPad’s weight of a pound and a half, I’ll survive---given the machine’s many capabilities. If nothing else, I can absorb books better if I don’t have trouble seeing them; and the new Brio eReader app could make the large-screen iPad even...

Where to start---in this first look at the iPad and some major e-reading apps for it? How about the new ones like iBooks and oldies like Stanza? A 32G WiFi-only iPad, almost fresh off the jet from China, is resting on my lap as I type. And even as a fan of public domain e-books and author of a novel from a clueful, DRM-hating small publisher, I’m delighted. No jokes about “hands-on” and the iPad name, please, and don’t be a jerk on the openness issue, either.The iPad is about much more than Apple’s control-freakish App...

John Wiley & Sons has partnered with Baker & Taylor to provide highly formatted content on the Blio platform, according to a news release. Wiley books to be offered will be educational and consumer titles, including cookbooks and travel books. Blio is a software platform developed by Ray Kurzweil that is platform neutral. I saw a demo at Digital Book World and it was very impressive. You could easily integrate "how to" videos into cookbooks or interactive maps into travel books. Blio will also provide print-to-speech if it is enabled by the publisher. The full press release is here....

I noticed that in the stories following CES this year, lots of media outlets were amazed at the sheer quantities of e-readers, tablets and other media devices on parade. Library Journal, http://www.libraryjournal.com/, also noted this but mentioned as well new companies such as COPIA, http://www.thecopia.com, and Blio, http://www.blioreader.com, which are advocating new methods and formats for ebooks and other types of media. At the cost of alienating many of us, the push for innovation and different formats, I think, is a good thing. From a library standpoint, now is a great time to push for internal change...

Such great device names: Kindle. Nook. Blio. Ectaco JetBook Lite. Spring Design Alex. Txtr. JournE. Skiff. Cool-er. Plastic Logic Que. iRex. Pixel Qi. Bookeen Cybook. Foxit eSlick. Astak EZ Reader. BeBook. Not exciting enough for you? How about the oh-so-brilliantly named Sony Reader? Most of these names are flat out horrible. What were the marketers thinking? These manufacturers are not only trying to build their brands in a crowded marketplace, they are trying to create a new market for a new generation of devices against a well established device that does not require electricity to operate, has a long history...

The Blio reading app, old news to TeleRead community members, will be in the spotlight at CES. Wired News has an upbeat story quoting the legendary Ray Kurzweil, one of the developers: “We have high-quality graphics and animated features. Other e-readers are very primitive.” As he sees it, people will want to read e-books on multiuse devices that can display color---like, er, that the tablet that Apple-ologists are all atwitter about---which the current E Ink machines can’t do. “We can take a PDF and an audio book and merge the two to get a combination such...