The New Toshiba eBook Store Powered by Blio

Last week we reported on Toshiba’s new Libretto W100 dual-screen laptop as a possible ebook reader, and now Toshiba is launching their own ebook store—the Toshiba Book Place—powered by Blio software.

Blio is a new ebook software platform created by Ray Kurzweil—a well-known inventor, author, and futurist—that preserves a book’s original layout, including fonts, images, and tables, according to the Blio website.

Toshiba’s Book Place, set to launch in the “coming weeks”, looks to be the first to implement the new Blio platform that will soon be available for PCs, netbooks, tablets, and other mobile devices. In fact, Toshiba is pre-loading Book Place and some free sample books onto their newer laptops.

What makes Blio software so unique is that it has a number of advanced e-reading features, such as playing embedded video and audio clips within books, text-to-speech, some books you can interact with and make selections, it has built-in research tools, such as dictionaries and web-based reference sites, and more.

When Blio launches, they will have over 1 million free books as well as books from bestselling authors from leading publishers like Hachette, HarperCollins, Random House, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Wiley, Elsevier and others.

Also, Blio claims to offer a wide selection of books that don’t translate well into ebooks, such as cookbooks, travel guides, how-to books, schoolbooks, children’s stories, and magazines and newspapers.

Toshiba’s Video Promo of Book Place

Source: eBookNewser