Screen-shot-2010-02-08-at-5.29.20-PM[1] This weekend, Tim Carmody at Wired had a summation of the Blio Windows app’s first few days and the flak it’s taken from reviewers. It reportedly suffers from accessibility problems and text-to-speech conversion issues.

Kurzweil has responded that the app was still undergoing improvements and a revised version will be released next month. An iOS 4 version is still in private beta. Carmody also mentions the controversy over Blio’s use of Feedbooks feeds without permission, and the fact that the Toshiba Blio store only has a little over half the titles of the main Blio store for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. (Even the main store only has 11,000 titles—considerably fewer than Amazon or Barnes & Noble have to offer.)

But Blio isn’t the only e-reading experience that Wired has found disappointing lately. Terrence Russell from Wired reviews the Sony PRS-350 touchscreen e-book reader, giving it a 6 out of 10. Though Russell finds a number of things to like about the device’s interface, he points out that the $180 device is overpriced by about $50 compared to the capabilities of other e-readers on the market.

Stories like these remind me that Amazon has captured such a large chunk of the market not just  through pricing e-books under $9.99, but also by packing an amazing number of features into a small, easy-to-use, and relatively cheap package. The Kindle really has become the yardstick by which all other e-book readers are measured—and most of them don’t seem to measure up.

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