Gadgetory

I mean afraid with cnet i'm here with computer legend Ray Kurzweil who is showing off a new e-book technology today bleeeeegh Oh joining the lots of different discussions we're having here at the Consumer Electronics Show about ebooks but this isn't a device it's actually software that runs on either a traditional PC or the iphone right you know there's a lot of people doing ebooks what got you interested in this and what are you bringing to the table I've actually been involved with reading machines and reading devices for 35 years we had a reader's 20 years ago for specialized population so now we're bringing it to the general public and we believe this is a big step forward Leo will provide the original format with all of the the graphics that the publisher has provided which a lot of other e-readers don't do and we have a lot of other features that can integrate with the web and with interactive capabilities that a computer can provide that you don't get on dedicated devices it will run ultimately on every device comes with a million free ebooks and you can then buy additional books it will synchronize with audio books and actually will read so you get the visual and audio experience with synchronized highlighting and that actually helps you to read and so it has a lot of capabilities other e-readers don't have and part of what Bleus strategy is is the idea not just we need a ebook reader that has color or this you know a new device but to take advantage of the devices that people are already carrying and take advantage of some of the capabilities that are on a more high powered device like a laptop yeah I think we're seeing that convergence on every level people want to have a small device and a device maybe this size and they wanted to do everything they don't want to carry an additional device just to do one application like reading and once you've done that now you've got access to the web and all of the interactive you said that a computer can provide and I think there's a couple interesting examples of what is this added display and connectivity allow you one of the first areas i think is children's books and maybe while you're talking we can show a demo of you know why this matters on a children's book so here we're seeing a children's book where the audio is that correct the audio as videos have been synchronized and so this or started off originally as a PDF and now we're adding in audio and we're getting a synchronized experience which is both the original graphics from the original layout of the book plus the audio and joining me is Peter Chapman one of the other executives at the company so here we're reading The Three Little Pigs and we're not just reading it on a laptop like we might if we had a digital book reader we're seeing obviously the graphics in color but what else can I do the three little pigs were old pink and plump they all had curly whirly tails when it was time for them to make their way in the world now we have a lot of research that shows that this actually helps build your reading skills so if you're a normal child learning to read this will enable you to read more quickly you can also read to learn read it your intellectual level it's really empowers children to read what they want and this is using a human read audio track but we can do it with high quality texas speech as well for any book and so one of the convergences in addition to devices that blue is actually banking on is the idea that the audio book of today and the digital book will converge so that you kind of have the best of both of those formats right and people like to get multimedia experiences and get the same information through different modalities that will be valuable for adults as well and there are other features if you have a textbook bring that up I we can embed interactive capabilities including web enabled features that really take advantage of the fact that it's a full platform so the idea here is that you might have something like a textbook in this case an anatomy book and within that there might be in this case we're seeing video that can play and that's actually a web browser that's going to the web and getting that video ionic bonding occurs between two atoms when one of the atoms has and here it's showing educational content but in theory you could have a magazine that had advertising magazines have never had video ads before but now they could one of the challenges is you know today there's lots of books in a sort of static eBook format but we don't have the kinds of enhanced books in a large-scale that you guys need so one of the things you're banking on is that publishers will want to invest and we'll see a business in investing that that rich format exists but publishers have it here's some web content and you can go to this website and it's not really integrated with the book so it's actually not going to be that hard for them to enrich the books with that content because they've already created it but now they can actually integrate it right in with the book which is the logical way to do it I mean here this little illustration which is now appearing right in the book is actually a dynamic web enabled application and so here we have a quiz that's designed to sort of augment the diagrams on the right hand side so blue it's going to be a free software download and when is it going to be available it'll be available next month and that what free download comes with a million for your books which you've gotten from five different sources and you'll be able to buy books and ultimately they'll be a very wide array of content available including a lot of enriched books which will give you an experience you can't get with paper books great thanks hey