“Many of the failures are fundamentally at odds with the one thing that Kurzweil was touting above all else: accessibility,” wrote Laura Dawson, a digital reading industry consultant, formerly of BarnesAndNoble.com. K-NFB initially promised to make e-books more accessible to blind readers; yet Windows, currently its only enhanced books platform, has known text-to-speech conversion issues.

K-NFB and Kurzweil responded by saying the software had been released before a fully-accessible version was ready, and that they plan to release an improved version next week.

“People understandably have very high expectations,” Kurzweil said in an interview with Wired.com Thursday. “We believe Blio is very usable and has many features other book formats don’t. And there are many features that we want to add.”

In addition to bug fixes and other tweaks, an accessibility release scheduled for October 25 will work with Freedom Scientific’s JAWS, screen reader software for Windows specifically tailored for blind users. The 1.0 version released Tuesday relied on Windows’ built-in text-to-speech capabilities.

K-NFB spokesperson Peter Chapman acknowledged the problems with Blio’s text-to-speech in an interview with Publishers Weekly, but blamed the platform, not the books: “the TTS software on most Windows machines isn’t very good.” Yet many Windows XP users were unable to even install Blio’s software. (This has since been resolved.)

K-NFB also confirmed that an iOS 4 version for iPhone and iPod Touch is currently in private beta, and that an iPad version will shortly follow the iPhone, probably sometime after November’s release of iOS 4.2. Android and Mac OS X versions are also in development.

Users weren’t the only ones frustrated with Blio. Hadrien Gardeur, founder and CEO of free e-books site FeedBooks, complained on Twitter that Blio was offering downloads from FeedBooks’ catalog without permission: “Hey Blio, next time that you add our OPDS [Open Publishing Distribution System] catalog to a commercial product, send us an e-mail first.”

In a follow-up e-mail, Gardeur noted that FeedBooks only allows other systems to include their catalog under the following conditions:

• full support for the EPUB standard (Blio converts EPUB into its own format and can’t support EPUB with other companies’ DRM)
• support the entire OPDS catalog (Blio only includes some of FeedBooks’ feeds)
• Add other OPDS catalogs to its library (Blio can’t do that)
• allow payment for commercial content through open standards (Blio doesn’t)

For these reasons, Gardeur asked Blio not to include FeedBooks’ content in its initial launch; according to Gardeur, K-NFB went ahead and included part of Feedbooks’ OPDS catalog anyways. Since FeedBooks has a planned system update forthcoming, it will most likely break Blio’s access to the catalog.

Kurzweil stated Thursday that K-NFB was continuing to work with Feedbooks and other free book providers; he credited the dispute over Blio’s use of their feeds to a miscommunication.

Finally, as we noted earlier this week, Toshiba launched its own branded version of the Blio application, store and e-book catalog called Toshiba Book Place. Toshiba is offering 6,000 titles at launch; Blio 11,000. This puts Blio at a distinct disadvantage against the 700,000 e-books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers for sale from Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s library of over 1,000,000 e-books.

It’s not precisely clear why there’s a gap in the number of books offered by Toshiba and Blio. But the brand and store fragmentation is another confusing component of a deeply confusing product launch. It’s especially troubling for those who have been hoping for serious innovation in making e-readers accessible to users of all abilities.

Image via Blio.com

See Also:

• UPDATE: Toshiba, Blio Jump In With Enhanced E-Books For Laptops …
• Singularity Proponent Ray Kurzweil Reinvents the Book, Again …
• 5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
• Apple's Tablet E-Book App Rips off Indie Dev's Creation
• Amazon's Kindle 2 Pits Authors Versus the Blind
• Apple's iPad Will Read Books Out Loud, Support Free E-Books …
• Copyright Owners Fight Plan to Release E-Books for the Blind …

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