You can activate Blio's text-to-speech feature by clicking the Play button in the lower left corner (again, as with Text Reflow, the publisher can disable the feature). Though the female voice in my tests sounded a lot better than most text-to-speech playback, it was still recognizably robotic. As the voice recites the text, the software highlights the words; this combination could be useful for people learning a language or trying to expand their vocabulary. Blio supports downloads of additional voices speaking other languages, too.

Blio's navigation tools include a Table of Contents icon on the lower left (next to the text to the text-to-speech Play button) ; click it, and you get a pop-up list of contents linked to their location in the book. You can move to specific pages by adjusting a slider at the bottom of the Book View screen. By default it represents your approximate location in the book as a row of dots; for greater specificity, click that row to produce the slider button and a pop-up showing the exact number of the page you're on. As you drag the slider, the page numbers flash by to help you locate the right page number. I found this approach much more user-friendly than the Kindle's use of location numbers, which typically mount into the thousands and aren't very helpful for returning to a specific location.

Regardless of the view you're in, a Notes tab on the left side of the page brings up a column for note-taking that you can opt to pin to the display. Blio also provides easy access to other annotation and lookup functions via a text toolbar that pops up when you right-click a word or group of words. From this toolbar you can apply highlighter to the selection, write a note, or look up the selection in Bing, Google, TheFreeDictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, or Wikipedia (all lookups occur online in new browser windows within Blio, so you must be online to use them).

When you add a new note, a little window pops up in the note panel showing the selected text and its location. You can type your note into that window; or, you can insert an image or a Website link by clicking an icon at the bottom of the window. The image icon lets you navigate in Windows Explorer to the location of the image you wish to insert; the Web content icon brings up a field where you can type in the URL of the site you want to link to. This kind of interactivity distinguishes Blio from other platforms that can reproduce print (Zinio comes to mind).

Still, as PC software, Blio doesn't address a problem that helped goose the hardware e-book market: Many people find that glare from a backlit LCD screen fatigues the eyes. Kindles and many other e-readers use reflective display technology from E-Ink and other companies, which depends on ambient light and is generally more relaxing for prolonged reading. At this writing, of course, E-Ink displays are available only in grayscale configurations, with no support for color. The uses an LCD with a bonded screen to minimize glare.