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By David Rothman

image We told you this was coming.

Inventor Ray Kurzweil (photo) said in October that his new blind-friendly software could handle text to speech as well as ePub and PDF formats. Kurzeil is involved with knfbReading Technology, a partnership with the National Federation of the Blind. So there could be more than hype here. Kurzweil in another incarnation invented a way to do optical character recognition from many fonts, a tech he then matched up with text to speech synthesis for the blind.

But can the new e-reading software—pick up some more details here—catch on?

Well, Mike Shatzkin at The Idea Logical Company says Blio software is in fact “the next big thing” in e-books.

He says Baker & Taylor, the big distributor, has 180,000 titles committed to Blio, with 50K to be available when the product is launched in January. According to Mike:

“Blio is a software client that can work on ‘any device with an operating system,’ which means computers and iPhones, but not Kindles. Based only on the demo we saw from Baker & Taylor Senior VP Linda Gagnon last week (of course I’d rather be reporting on something I saw on my own computer or iPhone), the presentation is the best I’ve ever seen. The type is crisp and sharp, it has full multiple-media functionality (video, graphics, TTV, links to the web), and it does tricks, my favorite of which is that you can see (on a PC screen) many pages at a time dealt out like a deck of cards. Then you find the ones you want and hone in on them. There are many ways to use that capability, particularly for an illustrated how-to book or a textbook.”

Among other things, B&T will convert publishers’ PDFs to Blio for free.

Of course, one big question is whether publishers will allow use of TTS capabilities. Let’s hope so. Another interesting issue is what Blio’s video capabilities, if elaborate, could mean for Vook’s video-enriched e-book application.

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