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Monday 21 June 2010
Ray Kurzweil Vows To Right E-Reader Wrongs

There’s Amazon.com’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iPad and a bevy of iPad and Kindle clones. Still, Ray Kurzweil, the famed inventor, thinks people deserve yet another option when it comes to reading books and magazines with an electronic device.

And so, Mr. Kurzweil presents Blio, a software package that can run on everything from PCs to hand-held devices. It displays colorful images and varying fonts with formatting similar to what people find in physical texts.

The Blio free software should become more widely available to consumers over the next two months, Mr. Kurzweil said, as large PC makers and retailers like Walmart begin to offer it on their own devices.

“Walmart is very excited,” Mr. Kurzweil said. (Melissa O’Brien, Walmart spokeswoman, said, “We speak to manufacturers and suppliers all the time regarding new products, so as a general rule we simply do not comment on speculation about what may be coming to Walmart or Walmart products until plans are absolute.”)

Mr. Kurzweil argued that the existing e-readers and tablets have limitations in the text formats they support and the way they handle the original images and layouts in printed texts. Blio preservers the original formatting, making it particularly attractive to publishers of things like cookbooks, how-to guides, schoolbooks, travel guides and children’s books.

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