iRiver Story review

Gallery

Verdict:

An attractive and sturdy device, the Story has more open format support, but the keyboard is almost redundant and it's not as easy to use or as good value as Amazon's Kindle.

Review Date: 19 Dec 2009

Price when reviewed: £229

Supplier: http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk

Reviewed By: Barry de la Rosa

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

IRiver is more well-known for its range of MP3 players, but the company has jumped on the ebook reader bandwagon with the aptly-named Story, a device that bears more than a passing resemblance to Amazon's Kindle reader. The Story is a more traditional reader, as it doesn't include a wireless service for downloading books and can only have new titles copied to it from a PC.

With support for PDF and Epub ebook formats, as well as Microsoft Office documents, the Story offers a more open platform than the Kindle, and iRiver has promised to add more format support via firmware updates. In fact there's already been an update to add reflow support for PDF files, so that they retain their formatting when you zoom in or out. It's the first ebook reader that we've seen that supports the OGG music file format, although listening to music will greatly reduce the Story's battery life.

It's much sturdier than the Kindle but the design is more attractive. The white plastic case is slightly narrower thanks to a smaller bezel around the screen, and there's a shallow lip around the edge of the case that makes it easier to grip. The keyboard's keys are larger and have a lighter action than the Kindle's. On either side of the keyboard are discreet Next and Previous page controls, but all other controls are included in the keyboard, such as zooming, settings menus and orientation control.

IRiver's user interfaces are always a bit avant garde, and the user manual isn't well-translated. For example, in each screen you can press the Options button to access a contextual menu, and the manual refers to the items on this menu as "Add-ons". Once you get around the odd nomenclature, you realise that the controls work mostly as you'd expect. There's no desktop application for transferring books to the Story, so you'll have to download and transfer them manually with the Story appearing as mass storage on your PC. You can copy encrypted files using Adobe's Digital Editions software.

There are some really nice touches: the time and date on the home screen is a welcome novelty, and not only does it remember where you left off reading, but there's a small bar above each book that shows your progress. There are dedicated music playback controls so you can listen to music while you read, and the sound quality is excellent. With 2GB of internal memory and an SDHC card slot, there's plenty of room to store music as well as books.

As well as reading books and listening to music, there are also diary and memo applications, which seem redundant on an ebook reader. In fact the only real use of the keyboard outside of these applications is to search for books - you can't use it to annotate them - which makes us wonder whether a simpler version without the keyboard might cost much less and make the Story a more viable competitor. As it is, the price is too high, and despite its good looks and open format support, the Story isn't as good value nor as user-friendly as the Kindle.

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User comments

Why must everything be compared to the Kindle? The kindle may have the looks and features, but I am sure many people would not want to be tied down to Amazon- there british book selection is terrible. And I do think it is as good value as the kindle, this has equally good features. Oh, and what is so fantastic about 3G? Why would you need internet on a reading divice? Getting books onto divices such as this one is really easy- and there is a selection of free ebooks to choose from on many sites (not on the kindle though). And, does the £30 price difference between the kindle and this make such a world of difference? And you have to get the kindle inported from the US...
Trust me, you do not need to take in all this rubbish about how fantastic the kindle is. The keyboard looks better on this ereader.

By computor_mad on 4 Feb 2010

Adobe Digital Editions and Iriver Story

I have just purchased (20 Feb 2010)a new Iriver Story (REI EB02(B)) and have not been to achieve the download to the reader that you describe for DCM files needing Digital Edition. Other epub and pdf formats have loaded readily. I have had no response ffrom Iriver on my query at this stage.

By Markpaynter on 28 Feb 2010

No update yet

I updated to the 1.61 and like the reflow and really dislike the corner zoom, but from a developers point of view, I understand the problems.

Most of mine ebooks are pdf, and if I can use reflow on them it really works nice, but there are really big problems.

Problems to consider:

1. The Zoom with the four steps, should be possible to customize in settings, so I would be able to have it on medium/sec.medium/high as my own customized standard.

2. Zoom in both versions does not work in landscape mode. Why?

3. The corner Zoom has to be easier in functionality, (sorry but to 80es software engineer loves his idea)

4. When I have a book on my SD card and read in it, the Story does not save my Reflow and Zoom settings, this means that i every time I read a book from my SD card have to inter the settings once more. (sorry but that's really crappy)

5. Why does the Story not recognize any book in the book section when i only have my books on a SD card, should recognize them. (have my books on diffrent SD cards, categorized)
This means that each time re-inter another SD card it shall remember where i was in the book and what Reflow/zoom i had, otherwise it wont be real to call it an expansion possibility.

6. The Reflow display some pdf, very weird, exampled under:

Fred is fat and lives in a shel
ter while eating fish with his toes, and usually he sleeps with fresh herring under his pillow.
Unfortunate for the other resi
dents in the shelter, he is resisting any fish related arguments.

So it breaks the lines in some words, this is really not acceptable, please fix it.

7. Must agree with critics that it is cheap not to deliver a cover with the story.

8. There should be a possibility to set the story, to re-inter directly into the book you just read last time, so you dont have to g0 through the menu every time.

9. I can not bookmark pages in pdf's.

10. Recent book, should be resent books, if you are reading several at the time.