Blio Provides Proper Formatting to E-Books

The vow to right the wrongs committed by all previous e-book readers—including the Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iPad and Sony’s Reader—has been made by Ray Kurzweil. Despite how late he is in the e-book reader market, he believes that consumers deserve yet another type of reader to make the enjoyment of electronic books and magazines a little simpler.

To provide this service, Kurzweil offers Blio. Blio is a software package—free for those that are interested—that can run on any PC or hand-held device. The difference between this software and the different readers, according to Kurzweil, is that it will display color photographs and text in the format that a reader would expect from a physical book. In other words, he plans on taking books and making them appear like actual books in his software.

It’s believed that, over the next few months, Blio will become more available to customers. As PC makers and large retailers—Wal-Mart being the big one—begin to take the software and pack it into their own products, more people will have the chance to use the software.

Mr. Kurzweil said that Wal-Mart was very excited, but the Wal-Mart team refused to comment on how “excited” they were because they get so many new potential suppliers that, until something is set in stone, they don’t comment.

According to Mr. Kurzweil, all other e-book readers were severely limited in how they could format text and images onto the screen. This meant that a book that might have a lot of graphs and images would look improper when read on one of the main readers. Blio, according to Kurzweil, doesn’t have this problem. This makes it very attractive to publishers of How-To guides and cook books where images and other non-text components are very important.

One thing can be for certain, though. Ray Kurzweil has a lot of experience creating technology products. He created the scanning system that allows blind people the chance to read. The software would scan the document and then read it out loud to them.

While there is no set release date for the Blio, those interested in the service can check out the site to get any questions answered. With so many different supported platforms and the free price- tag added on top of that, it will prove to be an interesting battle between the powerful e-book readers and the free Blio.