Earlier this week Baker & Taylor introduced its Blio e-book reader software to attendees of the the Digital Book World conference. First presented at the Consumer Electronic Show, the product made an unusual splash because – unlike the scores of e-reader devices presented at the Las Vegas expo, Blio is not hardware. It’s a platform.

After watching the spellbinding demo I owe Baker & Taylor an apology for twitting them about the name of their product. With use it will become as familiar to us as Google or Kindle. And it will be used often and well, I guarantee. It is an absolutely terrific product.

By downloading the free software you can read an e-book on just about any tablet, phone, or netbook. Unlike so many e-readers Blio’s screen is full color, not E Ink, making it the perfect vehicle for such products as color-illustrated textbooks or children’s picture books. “Blio actually lays out the ‘pages’ as they would be seen on paper, with typography and illustrations copied across,” write Priya Ganapati and Charlie Sorrel on Wired.com’s Gadget Lab. “It also uses video.” In fact, with Blio loaded into your reader you can interact with your book by importing illustrations – jpegs and videos – from the publisher’s website, making your book a living thing. This is especially true for children’s books with read-aloud features, interactive text, automatic page-turning, and a lookup archive for every single word – at least of every word in the book demo’s at DBW.

Blio’s bookstore will be rolled out in February with one million free books plus proprietary titles supplied by publishers. Ganapati and Sorrel add: “Other big features include a text-to-speech capability, an online library that stores each customer’s books, making them available on any Internet enabled device, including smartphones. The books can also be downloaded for offline reading.”

Downside? Craig Morgan Teicher, writing for MediaBiestro’s Galleycat, says they include “an apparent lack of Mac support: the system requirements on the Website list only Windows. Also, blogger Mike Cane points out that the Website shows no support for writers to create their own eBooks, meaning this is unlikely to become a self-publishing platform, a factor which many think is essential to the future of publishing.” Having witnessed the interactivity of Blio I’m not sure how Cane came to that conclusion. I can visualize Blio as a great vehicle for the creation of vooks.

Think you might be interested? Come on in – the software’s free. Click here.

Richard Curtis

How much money goes into developing an e-book reader or a reading software program? Millions of dollars, certainly. You would think that investors and developers would want to do everything in their power to protect their investment, right? And when it came to naming their device they would use the same skill and market research that car manufacturers bestow on, say, “Escalade”, or that pharmaceutical corporations use to come up with “Flomax”, yes? They would not leave it to some unimaginative functionary with a tin ear, would they? Because if they did, they would end up with some execrable word that makes it difficult if not possible for their e-reader to succeed. A name like…Flepia. Or Cool-er. Or WordsGear. Or Que.

Yes indeed, you would certainly think so. But those are the names of recently introduced e-readers. You can read about them in Another E-Book Reader with a Dumb Name. And then there’s the Nook, whose modest success is certainly not due to the prurient associations its name evokes.

One would hope that any newcomer in the field would look at this sorry nomenclature and select a name rivaling the brilliance of “Kindle”. So, it is with great bafflement that we report that in January Baker and Taylor will be introducing a book platform called…Blio. According to Mike Shatzkin, it’s ” the Next Big Thing in ebooks.” It certainly sounds cool. Writes Shatzkin:

“Blio is a software client that can work on “any device with an operating system”, which means computers and iPhones, but not Kindles. Based only on the demo we saw from Baker and Taylor Senior VP Linda Gagnon last week (of course I’d rather be reporting on something I saw on my own computer or iPhone), the presentation is the best I’ve ever seen. The type is crisp and sharp, it has full multiple-media functionality (video, graphics, TTV, links to the web), and it does tricks, my favorite of which is that you can see (on a PC screen) many pages at a time dealt out like a deck of cards. Then you find the ones you want and hone in on them. There are many ways to use that capability, particularly for an illustrated how-to book or a textbook.“

You can read about it in detail in Shatzkin’s blog, and if he says it’s brilliant, that’s good enough for us. But…Blio? What does it mean? If it’s a play on “Biblio”, we’re not sure how many users are going to get the pun. Did they mean to say “Brio”? That would have been a great name. Con Brio means “spirited” or “animated” (and if you’re a developer feel free to use the word). If you google “Blio” the first thing you get is “Did you mean bilo?” If you google Baker and Taylor Blio you get “Did you mean Baker and Taylor bio?” Google on and you will learn that BLIO is an acronym for such places as North Carolina’s Business License Information Office and the British Library, India Office.

We wish Baker and Taylor every success with its Blio and can’t wait to see a demo. We just wonder if they aren’t handicapping themselves with another dumb name.

Richard Curtis