Quote:
Originally Posted by nohmi2
I will go into the sites that you recommend, and will try PDF's and ePubs straight from the folder I have( from ADE) without converting. That will be OK won't it?
From what I remember the iRiver Story will accept them.
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Yes it will, though the one answer I've received so far from iRiver points out that the Story was never designed to reflow DOC files or most PDFs, so - depending on how they were formatted in the first place - you may not be able to read them very easily.
Their suggestion is to reformat the documents in the first place, and use something like 24pt for the font size to make a new PDF. That's hardly practical, I feel, and not achievable if you have the PDF but not the document it originally came from. Otherwise,
some PDFs will reflow when you zoom them - when the PDF is open on the Story, if you hit the Options button, the pop-up menu will have an item saying "Reflow". Not all PDFs reflow, though, and that seems to depend on their contents and how they were generated in the first place, not on the Story's capabilities. As a format, PDF by its nature wasn't intended to be reflowable, and it's one of the formats that fares the least well in conversion to ePub. So I guess points for trying to iRiver for including support for the format, but it's not the solution it sounds like in the advertising material.
With ePubs, I tend to go in (using Sigil) and edit the font size. (You can only do this if the ePub doesn't have DRM applied, obviously.) The font size is usually specified early in the style sheet - and then, of course, you have to check that other attributes aren't applied later in the CSS that also specify a font size - and for the Story, I usually specify about 20 or 24 pt. I find that's about equivalent to a paperback book when the Story opens the file in its default setting. (The alternative is not resetting the font size, and using the middle zoom setting on an ePub, but personally I find that makes the text too big, and you get too little copy to a page. And one advantage of setting the font size in the file itself is that you don't have to alter the zoom setting - if you're reading a book off the SD chip rather than the Story's internal memory, then the Story won't remember the setting anyway on that file.)
Since the Story supports ePub, it's a bit of a pity it doesn't also support HTML, which would have made life a little easier. Ah well. I'm hoping the new firmware might improve the way the Story handles TXT files, but I'm not counting on it.
It's not quite so easy as buy the reader, plug it in, copy files across and sit down with a cup of tea and read, is it?
I was hoping for that. But it seems that's true of pretty much any of the ereaders. (The Kindle might be a bit different, if you're only trying to read books pre-formatted by the publishers. I've never tried the Kindle - ironically, I bought the Story so I wouldn't feel locked into a specific format, but the only one it supports very well is ePub, so I'm effectively locked in anyway. But at least it's not to a specific
vendor.)
Good luck with it all, nohmi2.