Last week we posted some news about Toshiba’s upcoming Android-Tegra powered SmartBooks. It looks like Toshiba is ready to launch a eBook store called “Book Place” to compliment those new products. What makes this different from all current offerings is that it uses Ray Kurzweil’s Blio platform which preserves the original formatting of the text (for those nice old classics) while providing a free text-to-speech function for those with vision needs. Blio is also platform agnostic, so you can read your books regardless if you’re running Ubuntu, Android, or Windows.

Undoubtedly this is a boost for Blio and gives Toshiba a foot through the door without having to build everything themselves. It is unclear what this partnership / licensing agreement means with respect to eBook content and Toshiba hardware.

We expect to have more details in the coming weeks as Toshiba gears up for the busy Q4 season.

Toshiba to Launch eBook Store Powered by Kurzweil's Blio - Mobile 2