Baker and Taylor Innovation
December 10th 2009 07:46
There's a longish piece on the Idea Logical blog talking about my old friends Baker and Taylor. Who are they? When I ran the bookstore they were amongst my biggest suppliers (we always seemed to owe them heaps of money). In the later days of my time in the bookshop B&T had become so techno-refined that I could order books direct online with them and they'd be in my store less than a week later - pretty good from the US to New Zealand.
In fact I used to rely on them as being able to get books to me faster than many of the NZ suppliers...
However, they're in the news for a rather different reason - which I might have already known about if I was still a bookseller. They're introducing a platform called Blio which is another competitor in the e-book race. Think Kindle, think Barnes and Noble's e-book system - this supposedly will outdo both of these, and many others.
Seemingly what will happen is this (roughly!): Publishers deliver PDFs, which B&T converts for free to the new format. The publishers get the ebook back with a tool kit that enables totally intuitive functionality that will change styles and layouts, embed links or video or audio and set up the TTV capabilities. If there is a recorded audio of the same text, the toolkit will synch it to the ebook automatically. And users can take notes, or mark up text with yellow (or other color) highlighting.
B&T has 180,000 titles already committed to Blio, at least 50,000 of which will be available at launch.
An article on Publishers' Weekly says that B&T will offer the software to consumers for free. Take that, Mr Kindle.
Another feature of this will be that there will be a vastly improved test to speech function. The inventor, Ray Kurzweil, claims that eventually it will be the format.
Kurzweil explained that the e-reader software will run on laptops and desktop computers (PCs and Macs) as well as netbooks and mobile phones or ipods—Windows mobile and the iPhone right away with other mobile phone operating sytems added as quickly as possible. The software can read any format from straight text to PDF and ePub.
I don't see the old handheld book going away just yet, (I strolled through a plaza today where there were several people reading) but these are certainly exciting times for books!.
In fact I used to rely on them as being able to get books to me faster than many of the NZ suppliers...
However, they're in the news for a rather different reason - which I might have already known about if I was still a bookseller. They're introducing a platform called Blio which is another competitor in the e-book race. Think Kindle, think Barnes and Noble's e-book system - this supposedly will outdo both of these, and many others.
Seemingly what will happen is this (roughly!): Publishers deliver PDFs, which B&T converts for free to the new format. The publishers get the ebook back with a tool kit that enables totally intuitive functionality that will change styles and layouts, embed links or video or audio and set up the TTV capabilities. If there is a recorded audio of the same text, the toolkit will synch it to the ebook automatically. And users can take notes, or mark up text with yellow (or other color) highlighting.
B&T has 180,000 titles already committed to Blio, at least 50,000 of which will be available at launch.
An article on Publishers' Weekly says that B&T will offer the software to consumers for free. Take that, Mr Kindle.
Another feature of this will be that there will be a vastly improved test to speech function. The inventor, Ray Kurzweil, claims that eventually it will be the format.
Kurzweil explained that the e-reader software will run on laptops and desktop computers (PCs and Macs) as well as netbooks and mobile phones or ipods—Windows mobile and the iPhone right away with other mobile phone operating sytems added as quickly as possible. The software can read any format from straight text to PDF and ePub.
I don't see the old handheld book going away just yet, (I strolled through a plaza today where there were several people reading) but these are certainly exciting times for books!.
| 40 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
