Ziff Davis AppScout | Blio feature-rich e-book app available for Windows

September 28, 2010

Ziff Davis AppScout — September 28, 2010

This is a summary. Read original article in full here.

Quite a few months have passed since Ray Kurzweil — K-NFB Reading Technology founder, and voice-recognition inventor — demoed his Blio e-book software at the Consumer Electronics Show back in January.

But, as of today, September 28, the Blio app is available for Windows. The free e-book reader app features over a million paid and free titles from a plethora of publishers, including Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Penguin Group, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster. The books are beautifully displayed in color with the original print-version fonts. Kindle owners who are stuck in a gray E Ink world may be wowed by the vibrant colors and graphics. Blio also includes hyperlinks, photos, and video clips within the content.

Blio allows users to directly insert notes, highlight text, and look up references on the Web without leaving the book. The content you download will go into a personal virtual library that you can access on a number of machines, which means you can start reading a book on your desktop computer at home, and pick up where you left off while you’re sitting at a coffee shop with your laptop.

You can even turn your text into an audio book and have Blio read aloud to you. It supports English, French, and Spanish languages, but there are plans to add Italian, German, and Asian languages later. The app should be available for Android, iOS, and Silverlight platforms shortly.