Is Blio the 800-pound gorilla of the e-book reader market?

October 2, 2010

[…] What the Blio software does offer, however, is an extremely compelling and easy-to-use book-like interface for the inexpensive and increasingly ubiquitous netbooks used by students.  And for those with a few more dollars to spend on an iPad, a Windows 7 Nav 9 tablet, or a ThinkPad Edge 11, it may just make your digital reading experience, if engadget is to be believed, pretty darn enjoyable for a computer.

The Blio eBook store launched with about 11,000 for-pay titles. Publisher’s Weekly reports that K–NFB is uploading 700 to 800 new books every day. They’re being loaded by their sales ranking, with the most popular books being uploaded first.  Contrast this with the 700,000 titles available from the Kindle eBook store as of September 2010. Unfortunately for K-NFB, the Blio rollout was mared by wildly varying prices (one user on Twitter complained of a Steig Larsson novel being offered for $27.95).  K-NFB spokesperson Peter Chapman blamed this on database input errors that have now been corrected. […]