Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Pelikan's Antidisambiguation-Blio

2010; Yale University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.7771/2380-176x.5675

2380-176X

Michael P. Pelikan,

Logic, programming, and type systems

Ray Kurzweil is one of those fortunate persons who is led forward in life largely by his curiosity.Some would say he's as close as we can get to having Thomas Edison living amongst us.Some would write him off as a nut.But if so, he's a really smart nut.His inventions, taken together, reveal a breathtaking span of disciplines, interests, and pursuits: Electronic music, Optical Character Recognition, Artificial Intelligence -and now, an eReader software package.I first ran across mention of Blio many months ago.Navigating to http://www.blio.combrought one to a simple page saying, "Coming Soon!" What were they promising?A new kind of eBook reader -"…what eReading should be…"Well this all sounded very interesting, so I signed up to receive alerts about Blio.Months went by.Nothing.I'd stop by the site from time to time -nothing appeared to have changed.Then, a few days ago -late September -I received an email message from Blio containing a link to a download page.Blio has been released -for Windows, at present, but with apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android promised soon.So -"what eReading should be," eh?What's that?Again quoting from the site, "Blio displays books in full color, with fonts, pictures, and layout as the publisher intended."Hmmm.How does it do that?Sounds like PDF or something, right?Well -sort of… Blio understands two formats at present, ePub and XPS.XPS is Microsoft's XML Paper Specification, which in turn has been standardized as OpenXPS by Ecma International (which began life as the European Computer Manufacturers Association but which became a Geneva-based, private standards body).Wikipedia has a decent article on OpenXPS, describing it as, "…an XML-based (more precisely XAMLbased) specification, based on a new print path and a color-managed vector-based document format that supports device independence and resolution independence.OpenXPS was standardized as an open standard document format on June 16, 2009."XPS differs from PDF in that PDF is, again quoting Wikipedia, "…a database of objects, created from PostScript and also directly generated from many applications, whereas XPS is based on XML." Indeed, XPS has been used by recent versions of Windows as the print spooler format, meaning that Windows 7, for example, includes a native XPS viewer with the operating system.The viewer, in effect, shows the user a view of the document (again from Wikipedia), "…created by printing to the virtual XPS printer driver."As XPS emerged as a document format, a whole raft of third-party tools began to support it: its creation, editing, manipulation, conversion, rendering, etc.The Blio download also installs Microsoft PlayReady, which Microsoft's official PlayReady site describes as, "…a content access and protection technology…optimized for the mobile industry to support the growth of online content services…" In other words, DRM.