The futurist Ray Kurzweil has come up with a major advance on eReader software that consumers can try out as early as next month.
Blio, available free for the PC and iPhone, offers features such as 3D page turns and a bookshelf where readers can rotate books to see backcover and spine.
Multi-page views are possible, as well as many text sizes and a read-aloud feature that highlights text in synchronisation with the speech.
These abilities should help the 40 per cent of the population that has reading issues, says Mr Kurzweil, such as those involved in early learning, learning English as a second language or suffering from impaired vision or dyslexia.
While he is best known today for his views on the future and establishing of the Singularity University, Mr Kurzweil’s first breakthrough was in optical character recognition in the 1970s.
“Blio stems from 35 years of technology of presenting books both visually and auditorily -
my very first project was a reading machine for the blind in the mid 70s,” he says.
Blio is working with publishers, retailers and the leading book distributor Baker & Taylor. They will need to use the XPS format being introduced by Microsoft in Office 2010 to benefit from the full effect of Blio’s software for digital books, which includes the ability to embed video, audio and elements such as sticky notes and highlighters.
More than a million free books available in ePub and other formats such as PDF can also take advantage of Blio.
The company – Kurzweil Technologies – will license its software to publishers and retailers so they can provide their own branding “skins”.
“Within 90 days, major retailers will come out with their Blio-powered readers and the same thing should happen with publishers,” says Peter Chapman, a Kurzweil executive.
“You can create a skin tied to the book so when you open it, it will say: there is a skin available for the book – so the whole reading experience can be skinned in a way that it adds to the branding of the book.”
Blio will be demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show next week and should be available as a free download for the PC in mid-January.
