The Singularity Hub reports on Ray Kurzweil's stunning new ebook platform, the Blio. Blio preserves the original format of books including typography and illustrations, in full color. It also takes advantage of Kurzweil's company's own high quality text to speech capabilities and supports animation and video content. The interesting thing for me is that authors can now begin thinking about how they might create with text, voice, music, image or video as part of the overall content package. Providing audio and video options embedded in a book might mean a whole new medium for poetry. I know that these things are already available, sometimes in patchy combination (.pdf will read to you, badly, and online books can incorporate multimedia elements), and I often play with these notions in performance, but having them in one attractive, portable package on any Netbook, iPhone, or e-reader is pretty cool. Free too. That's even nicer. Now if only Ray can invent some means of expanding time so we fit in time to create meaningful content for these new tools. I know he's working on it. Thursday, January 7, 2010
Kurzweil invents the future (again...)
The Singularity Hub reports on Ray Kurzweil's stunning new ebook platform, the Blio. Blio preserves the original format of books including typography and illustrations, in full color. It also takes advantage of Kurzweil's company's own high quality text to speech capabilities and supports animation and video content. The interesting thing for me is that authors can now begin thinking about how they might create with text, voice, music, image or video as part of the overall content package. Providing audio and video options embedded in a book might mean a whole new medium for poetry. I know that these things are already available, sometimes in patchy combination (.pdf will read to you, badly, and online books can incorporate multimedia elements), and I often play with these notions in performance, but having them in one attractive, portable package on any Netbook, iPhone, or e-reader is pretty cool. Free too. That's even nicer. Now if only Ray can invent some means of expanding time so we fit in time to create meaningful content for these new tools. I know he's working on it. 
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I had never heard of the Blio. It's a great concept. I have the Sony Touch Reader and my one (and only) complaint is that, with certain magazines (and probably text books), the formatting doesn't work well.
ReplyDeleteE-readers and e-books are definitely a fast-moving trend. As you said, now we just need a way of expanding time. There is simply never enough of that!