The Digital Reader

So I watched Ray demo Blio last night, and I’m impressed, almost in spite of myself. Blio comes with the standard ebook reader features, but that’s only the beginning. You can embed audio in a Blio ebook and then tie that audio to the text. It also has decent TTS. With Blio, the original full page content is in the ebook as well as the text. The Blio will launch with support for Mac, PC, and iPhone. The Kindle TTS problem was raised, and Ray said that Blio is only the platform; content is up to the publishers. If they want to put that feature in, they can.

But then I started thinking, and I found a downside. The Blio format is web based, so if an author decides to change a detail, he can push the change out to all copies everywhere. Or a publisher can put ads in magazines and change them when the ad contract runs out. I’m really bothered by the control others will have over my property. I, for one, will not use Blio.