At CES 2010 this year, Microsoft talked about Ray Kurzweil’s Blio Reader, a piece of software designed to display and interact with books on a desktop PC, a laptop, or a tablet computer. The idea, similar to Microsoft’s Reader software from about ten years ago, is to forego the low-power bistable display-style computers (e.g., Kindle, Nook, etc.) and leverage people’s existing (or new) PCs for reading and interacting with books. All in all, it’s probably the right way to go for several reasons:
- You don’t force people to buy yet another devices and carry yet another charger,
- You don’t worry about the book form-factor unless the person wants to get a slate, and
- You can take advantage of powerful CPUs and capable displays that can actually bring interactivity to reading.
And of to top it off, this software will be free. Who wouldn’t want that?
Certainly publishers and retails should be happy. Blio offers partnership deals for publishers, providing “conversion, encryption, embedded data and everything else you need for your book to wow readers onscreen.” It offers deals for retailers, including custom skins for particular retails and integration into existing commercial applications.
What it doesn’t seem to offer is a platform for third-party applications that could bring computation of all sorts to the reading experience. A reading system like Blio is a platform, and it shouldn’t pretend otherwise. It’s strength is the versatility of the computer that it runs on, a versatility that can only be taken advantage of by a large, distributed, capable, and motivated group of people who can use it to pursue their varied interests, their varied views of the world, their niche markets. That group of people does not, and never will, work for Microsoft or Kurzweil. They will work for themselves, and by doing so will enrich themselves, Microsoft (if it can manage to stay out of the way as much as possible), and the reading experiences of millions of people.
Microsoft and Kurzweil should pay attention to the ecology of applications that have made devices such as the iPhone much more capable and desirable through an open application development process than would not have been cost-effective in-house at Apple. They should look at Twitter and understand that some of the popularity of the service is due to its open platform that enables a large ecology of tools that Twitter didn’t have to (and didn’t know to) build. They should look carefully at the almost twenty year history of the e-book (hardware an software) and think about how to make this latest variant succeed where so many others have failed.