Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s great innovators (and I still use one of his MIDI keyboards, now nearly 20 years old). His speech recognition and synthesis are amazing, and his general ideas of how we should interact with machines (or the other way round) are usually way in advance of their time.
His latest project is YAER (Yet Another Ebook Reader) – why? Because it’s there? Kurzweil will almost certainly do it better than anyone else, and the Blio (another silly name to go with nook and Kindle) promises great things. But look at the supported platforms: Windows, iPhone and “most desktops, laptops, netbooks and tablets”. No explicit mention of the Mac platform, although the iPhone is being supported.
So… is the rumored Apple tablet (iSlate??) going to incorporate Blio technology as an integral part of its OS and user experience? Despite Steve Ballmer keynoting the Blio at CES, it wouldn’t surprise me if Steve Jobs, once again, had taken the best from elsewhere and created a whole better than the sum of its parts.
I have other issues with the idea that there will be a million free ebooks for the Blio – are authors intended to live on God’s good fresh air to sustain themselves? – but these can wait.
Technorati Tags: ebook, ebooks, publishing, software, technology
I find it very awkward in reading from a tablet when compared to conventional sources.