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Blio e-reading software still alive, will come preloaded on T-Mobile Android devices
Remember Blio? Yes, our memories of this colorful ebook-reading software are starting to fade too, but now T-Mobile's about ready to yank it from the shadows of obscurity with a newly announced partnership. Content provider Baker & Taylor will be responsible for installing the Blio Android app on "select future products from T-Mobile USA" and populating it with compelling content. The Blio store has grown to now encompass a healthy three million titles, both free and paid, and should you have the Windows version of its software, you'll get the sweet automation of having it sync with your mobile device as well. To get your reading started nice and early, jump past the break for the full press release.
Blio seeks to take digital reading in a new, more inclusive, and colorful direction
As if we didn't have enough pretenders in the ebook space, here's Ray Kurzweil with a new format of his own and a bagful of ambition to go with it. Set for a proper unveiling at CES in a week's time, the Blio format and accompanying application are together intended to deliver true-to-life color reproductions of the way real books appear. Interestingly, the software has been developed in partnership with Nokia, in an effort to turn Espoo's phones into "the smallest text-to-speech reading devices available thus far," though apps are also being developed for the iPhone, PC and Mac. The biggest advantage of this format might actually be behind the scenes, where the costs to publishers are drastically reduced by them having to only submit a PDF scan of their books, whose formatting remains unchanged in Blio. We'll be all over this at CES, but for now you'll find more pictures and early impressions over at Gizmodo.
Kurzweil set to unveil portable reader for the blind
Even though we've seen a ton of products designed to aid the visually-impaired in their daily lives, technology still has a long way to go before disabled folks are able to enjoy a completely unrestricted lifestyle, which is why inventor/visionary Ray Kurzweil has spent the last quarter-century building devices that make reading easier for the blind. His latest invention, called the K-NFB, is basically a five megapixel digital camera attached to the back of a Windows Mobile 5.0-powered PDA, which is loaded with software that uses optical character recognition and text-to-speech technology to read aloud the words contained in user-captured photos. Once it's called into action, the $4,860 device supplies the operator with an initial "situation report" that attempts to describe whatever's in the camera's field of vision; if the report indicates that the desired text is within range, owners can then choose to snap a photo and listen to the resulting translation. Although the K-NFB is scheduled to be released soon by the UK's Sight & Sound, several technical issues -- most importantly, the software's difficulty in understanding inverted (white-on-black) text -- still have to be ironed out before it's available to the public.[Thanks, Megan]
