New York Times — June 18, 2010 | Ashlee Vance

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

There’s Amazon.com’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iPad and a bevy of iPad and Kindle clones. Still, Ray Kurzweil, the famed inventor, thinks people deserve yet another option when it comes to reading books and magazines with an electronic device. And so, Mr. Kurzweil presents Blio, a software package that can run on everything from PCs to hand-held devices. It displays colorful images and varying fonts with formatting similar to what people find in physical texts. The Blio free software should become more widely available to consumers over the next two months, Mr. Kurzweil said, as large PC makers and retailers like Wal-Mart begin to offer it on their own devices.

“Wal-Mart is very excited,” Mr. Kurzweil said. (Melissa O’Brien, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said, “We speak to manufacturers and suppliers all the time regarding new products, so as a general rule we simply do not comment on speculation about what may be coming to Wal-Mart or Wal-Mart products until plans are absolute.”) […]