Blio Site Live

"Nate the Great" over at MobileRead notes that the Blio eReader site is now live. While I love Ray Kurzweil's books for amazingly interesting reads into what the future will bring (note: I treat them as 100% fiction), I'm not sure this is the future of eBooks, and agree with Nate... the hardware requirements sound too stiff to expect an eReader.

People who think the "tablet" or "slate" will replace the eReader are wrong. In the near future, people will continue to appreciate the lack of eye strain with the more-like-paper-less-like-a-backlit-LCD eInk screens, as well as the week or more of battery life versus a few hours.

Software will soon be available for PCs, netbooks, tablets and mobile devices.

You know what's missing? eReaders. ePub is the way to go. Then you can support two of the top three manufacturers of readers - Sony and Barnes and Noble. Amazon can continue playing all proprietary and junk... I think long term it's bad for the industry and ultimately bad for their marketshare... I really think they will be overtaken.

Right now, Amazon's format works. They were the second mainstream offering, but quickly took marketshare from Sony, no doubt thanks to the built in wireless and dirt cheap prices for books ($9.99 for most new releases and mainstream releases). They seemingly have at least hundreds of thousands, and probably a couple of million Kindles shipped in their various iterations (nobody really knows, but the number is a lot relative to the competition, for sure). Sony realizes proprietary wasn't working for them (amazing to use the words Sony, proprietary, realizes and wasn't working for them in the same sentence given their history) and switched to ePub. Barnes and Noble realized they could enter the market with similar standards support and their built in brand - nobody has a bigger brand name for book sales than Barnes and Noble. Not Borders, and not Amazon. But Blio? Kurzweil? Looks neat, but does not look mainstream to me.