Today, Toshiba will announce its entry into the e-book market with Toshiba Book Place, a Windows application developed by K-NFB, to both purchase and read enhanced e-books. The application will be bundled with all of Toshiba’s laptops, and will also be available as a free download from their website. The library will initially offer 6,000 e-books for purchase. K-NFB also launched its own application, Blio, described below.
Wired.com interviewed Terry Cronin, a vice president for Toshiba America. While e-books for dedicated e-readers and other devices have been successful, he believes e-books for laptops can offer something unique for particular kinds of reading — especially those that benefit from immediate access to other media.
“It’s a device that people already have,” he said. “If you’re traveling or bringing a bag, you’re already bringing your laptop with you. You don’t need to bring another device.”
Cookbooks, children’s books, and textbooks all benefit from the greater storage space and graphics capabilities of a laptop, Cronin said. The goal a library of e-books enhanced with 3-D viewing and embedded video, audio, and online search and web browsing.
Toshiba developed the application with futurist Ray Kurzweil’s K-NFB Reading Technology, Inc., a joint venture with the National Federation for the Blind. K-NFB is working with publishers to encode the books in the XPS e-book format and add video and audio enhancements to the e-book library.
UPDATE: Today, K-NFB is also announcing Blio, its own e-reader application with a built-in bookstore, available for immediate download (Windows only). It appears to be essentially identical to Toshiba Book Place, and the books available are the same format and selection; you could say that Book Place is a Toshiba-branded version of Blio.
It’s not clear to me whether this will work. There are already e-book applications from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others available for Windows laptops with a much wider selection of books and portability across devices. The Amazon Kindle marketplace contains 700,000 e-books for sale, for instance, while Barnes & Noble’s offers over a million.
The hope is that XPS will catch on, and emerge as a standard alongside EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and other electronic document formats. Then the store will be able to expand to support other outlets. But right now, that looks like a long shot.
Toshiba Book Place [ToshibaBookPlace.com]
Image credit: Toshiba
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