Toshiba has released a preview page for its upcoming online eBook store Book Place. Book Place will offer today's best-sellers, cookbooks, travel guides, children's books, textbooks, and more. Through Blio, the store will support a full-colored, 3-D and interactive reading experience. The Book Place format will include audio in multiple languages, hyperlinks, note-taking capacity, and text-to-speech capabilities that may be able to turn eBooks into audiobooks. The software will be pre-installed on corporate notebooks and bundled with a collection of free books.
The new store will be powered by Blio, an eReader software which has caused a buzz in the industry for its ability to preserve books' original printed format as well as its interactive capacities. Blio software clearly favors tablet readers over e-ink.
Book Place will be entering a marketplace of relatively few eBook stores. Major contenders currently include Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Nobles, and Borders.
Google also plans to enter the eBook market with Google Editions. Google Editions will be not device-specific, allowing any web-enabled computer or reader to access purchases. Google Editions will also be searchable through Google's Book search. Google is expected to launch its store sometime this summer.