First Look at Blio, Ray Kurzweil's Tablet-Friendly Ebook Format

[anurag]

From http://gizmodo.com/5435814/first-loo...y-ebook-format:

Blio, officially debuting next week at CES, lets you read your ebooks as they're intended to look on paper. Clearly, Kurzweil is signaling his choice of tablets over e-ink, and his first shots are definitely persuasive.

With apps planned soon for the iPhone and PCs, Blio's cross-platform functionality makes it a natural fit for something like the Apple iSlate, which along with other tablet devices should be perfect for reading cookbooks, children's books, and any other illustrated tome. It marks a natural evolution away from the current stock of ebook readers, which are bound by the drab black and white of e-ink.

...

[DawnFalcon]

Oh look, Gizmodo making themselves look stupid again.

ePub is in no way limited to what e-readers can do, it's DBook/XHTML and is perfectly capable, as a standard, of handling complex books. As to TTS, existing readers do that, etc. etc.

[Nate the great]

Everyone says Blio will be demoed at CES, but I can't find the booth. The company doesn't appear to listed as an exhibitor.

But I did find the homepage for blio:
www.blioreader.com

[LDBoblo]

I think I'm missing something here.

What is the point of this? Multimedia PDF basically?

I mean, I'm all for a nice tablet solution, and I hate epub execution so far. I just don't know what this is really offering.

[Happ]

Right. The closest thing to a book is something that needs power every 4 hours or so, does not fit in your pocket, is unreadable on the beach and you cannot hold it with just one hand while having coffee in a restaurant.

Back to reality, back to Bebook.

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by Happ

Right. The closest thing to a book is something that needs power every 4 hours or so, does not fit in your pocket, is unreadable on the beach and you cannot hold it with just one hand while having coffee in a restaurant.

Back to reality, back to Bebook.

Closest thing to a book is a book. No really good substitutes yet. Your BeBook is as useless and pathetic for many kinds of reading as current tablets are for all-day beach novel reading.

Random tablet hate is unbecoming.

[DawnFalcon]

Why? Look, Slate PC's are nothing new. The industry's wandered off into heavy tablet PC's, sure, but my old Fujitsu Stylistic (RIP) was a darn nice device. If they're being reintroduced, great, but they should be no more expensive, at worse, than the tablet PC's of the same spec since they ditch the keyboard and often other portions (the Stylistic had no floppy or CD/DVD drive...) of the electronics.

I'm not amused by tech sites which treat them as the new hotness and get themselves lathered up about them.

[Stormchild]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

Closest thing to a book is a book. No really good substitutes yet. Your BeBook is as useless and pathetic for many kinds of reading as current tablets are for all-day beach novel reading.

Random tablet hate is unbecoming.

Care to expand on the MANY types of reading that the Bebook (or others) is pathetic at?

I throw your last line back at you changing 'tablet' for 'electronic reader'.

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by Stormchild

Care to expand on the MANY types of reading that the Bebook (or others) is pathetic at?

I throw your last line back at you changing 'tablet' for 'electronic reader'.

The word many was your own emphasis, and not mine.

It should not require much thought to figure out what kinds of documents are pretty bad on ebook readers, and particularly on smaller ones like the BeBook.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

I think I'm missing something here.

What is the point of this? Multimedia PDF basically?

I mean, I'm all for a nice tablet solution, and I hate epub execution so far. I just don't know what this is really offering.

Not much info in the article.
I'm certainly not seeing anything compelling that is different than reading on a netbook.

[Robertb]

Originally Posted by anurag

From http://gizmodo.com/5435814/first-loo...y-ebook-format:

Well, that drab black and white does give 8,000 pages to a single charge and causes less eye strain. Most books are black ink on white (bleached) paper.
An Astak Pocket PRO costs about $199 and even has Text-To-Speech with the leather case and ear buds included.

So, while the tablet may sound great initially... try getting one by airport security now and buying one for $199.

[wallcraft]

I checked a few of the titles in the "All Books" image, to see if any were exclusives. Let the Great World Spin, In Defense of Food, and Strength in What Remains (for example) are on the Kindle, but all three have text to speech disabled.

[kovidgoyal]

Oooo pretty pictures, mommy I want one!

[phenomshel]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Oooo pretty pictures, mommy I want one!

Kovid, you are something else. What, I'm not sure. But something. (That was meant to be a compliment, by the way...)

[exreader]

i'm looking for something revolutionary... iFlowers for instance. color and texture and SMELL. interactive! plant seeds, watch your flowers grow! speed up time! bonus packs include iBugs and iFungus and iPests to syngergistically add to your growing garden...

uhm, yeah

ex