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Wiley goes with Blio
February 9, 2010 | 7:20 am
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By Paul Biba
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.
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Comments:
Hi ! Just a remark:
Teleread says — Blio is a software platform … that is platform neutral. –
The news announcement says — Blio is also hardware neutral, meaning it works on a number of devices, including personal computers, laptops, netbooks and iPhones, not to mention up and coming tablets. –
I would urge to be cautious with the term “platform neutral”, which can easily be mistaken for “cross-platform”. Baring in mind that at this stage this is just speculation based on vague details from press releases, I don’t think that the growing community of Mac users will benefit from the “sexy” features Blio seem to offer.
You see, the current version of the Blio Reader (as demonstrated by its creators) is written in .NET / WPF ; just like the KNFB Reader PC [1] ; which is a Microsoft Windows-only technology (desktop, not mobile). The iPhone “companion” software looks like a diminutive spin-off, and it looks like it’s nothing ground-breaking (there are good mobile ePub / e-Book readers out there, available right-now).
Let’s face it: the buzz surrounding the Blio venture is essentially due to (1) the promised integrated video and interaction features ; which is possibly innovative, if content providers actually follow suit (see the existing Vook offering) ; and (2) to the cool user-interface / 3D animations / smooth transitions (nothing new, but which will appeal to an audience nonetheless).
The word-by-word TTS rendering is nice, however this doesn’t guarantee that the content will be accessible to blind users. Visually-impaired users may feel at home, but blind users have much more sophisticated functional requirements.
There was actually a mention of synchronized human narration (i.e. recorded audio), but I doubt it will be as accessible and fully-featured as a DAISY Digital Talking Book.
From what we have seen so far, these exiting features are provided by the *Windows-only* reader software. Porting this development effort to Mac OS X (or the iPhone OS, or Android, or any Linux variants) would be *very* costly. I think it’s safe to say that the “full power” of the Blio Reader will only be available on Windows desktop, where the screen real estate and computing power are sufficient to render the fixed-size multimedia reading experience (i.e. PDF-like, non-reflowable markup).
With that in mind, I am personally not too exited about the Blio Reader…curious at most, but not enthusiastic. I could be wrong on all accounts of course, let’s hope I am. ;o)
Regards, Dan
[1]
http://www.knfbreader.com/products-kreader-pc.php