Some of the best e-Reading experiences and innovations are happening on the web right now.
Ray Kurzweil’s Blio eReader is finally available and Scribd announced today it is enriching its entire library with Apture Highlights – a feature already enabled on this very blog post.
To try this out, highlight with your mouse any keyword in this post, such as this one – iPad – and then click on the “Learn More” button that appears.
A box with a Wikipedia entry about the iPad should appear, as well as photos, recent stories about the iPad on FT.com and relevant results from around the web.
Publishers like this Apture feature because readers can get more information from within a story, without having to follow links or searches off-site.
I also like to add Apture links within the text to enrich blog posts. By clicking on them, this can give readers multiple windows of embedded information such as maps, photos, Wikipedia entries, stock charts,YouTube videos and Twitter streams. Just click anywhere on the post to dismiss them.
Scribd is using Apture Highlights to give a new dimension to its library of tens of millions of books and documents.
These were viewed using Flash until Scribd converted its entire library of more than 1bn pages of written content to HTML5 standards earlier this year, making it more searchable.
So now, information, photos, videos and other media can augment the text in ways eReaders like the Kindle can’t.
“Imagine reading a book that references Venice and simply by highlighting the word being able to pull in photos and videos of the Grand Canal or a map of the region,” says Tristan Harris, Apture chief executive.
Some extra features I would like to see would be a priority given to dictionary definitions of highlighted words, an option to translate them and an indexing feature, where highlighting a name or subject would find all other references to them within the book being viewed.
In Blio, which I first wrote about last December, the launch release of the software reproduces the colour, layout and original fonts from the print versions of books.
There is also realistic reading aloud of the text using Nuance Vocalizer text-to-speech technology. Words are highlighted as they are spoken.
Blio allows digital notes to be inserted in pages and personal libraries can be accessed from different devices. Anyone reading on a home PC can pick up where they left off on their laptop and iPhone and Android apps are on the way.
