iRiver Cover Story Owners Gather! + Review

[silv]

Yes acce can be set to manually.

Only the latest firmware UPDATE seems to be protected.

Haven't heard of any iRiver apps yet.

[martinmach]

Some questions from my side

are there any good suggestions of converting scientific pdfs to something decent usable on the story? i currently use papercrop to manually crop pages to jpg and then zip them and read them in comic book reader. This is quite hard if there are about 40 new articles every week.

i also use dimensions, width = 3.47 and height = 4.54 from sony's method of converting doc to pdf. are there any other optimal values available?

I almost had this reader for a year and used it much. but now i find the battery to be discharging fast, sometimes in couple of days. is this common

[MacEachaidh]

Originally Posted by martinmach

I almost had this reader for a year and used it much. but now i find the battery to be discharging fast, sometimes in couple of days. is this common

I've heard of this as a problem with pretty much every device on the market, so maybe it's just an eReader thang, though perhaps different brands age at different rates. (My Story is only about six months old, so I haven't seen any sign of this yet myself. No doubt I will, though.) But I've seen lots of questions asked on IT and gadget forums about brands and models that allow the user to replace the battery, so it would seem a lot of people are encountering similar problems.

Maybe this is an aspect of the current level of technology that isn't quite market-ready yet. And as far as the Story is concerned, it's not helped by the fact that it seems pretty clear iRiver doesn't exactly use top-of-the-range components.

Have you asked iRiver tech support, to see what they have to say about it? They're obviously not going to say "yeah, our batteries are crap", but you might get an idea whether this is what's to be expected or maybe you got a bum one to start with. (What's the warranty? 12 months? I got three years' warranty on mine, but I think that was a special deal with the retailer I bought it from.)


About the PDFs, I'm sorry, but I have nothing to suggest except what you're already doing - formatting them to a document size more friendly to the screen. Pain in the arse when you've got so many documents, I know. I have spoken to iRiver tech support in the past about this specific problem (with both PDF and DOC formats), and the custom page size was the only suggestion they could make, as well.

[martinmach]

the warranty is only 12 months. so i am pretty much screwed if the battery dies. running the book reader on AC is not even possible. one more thing i noticed is that sometimes when it goes into the screen saver mode, the picture is barely visible. instead all i see is a white hue. but i cannot repeat this issue at that time and it comes back randomly.

I paid almost 300 euros a year ago and the main issue used to be the build quality ( never dropped it !!!). but it seems there will be two problems that might worsen after i go off the warranty.

back to my original question, i was enquiring if there are any page dimensions that might be more suitable for iriver than sony?

[greenapple]

I've had a chance to play with the Cover Story at a store for a short time. I must say, the hardware is pretty cool, and the response from touch is quick. It's much smaller and lighter than the original, and feels quite comfortable to hold. I brought my SD card to the store for a quick test, and here's the result:

Cover Story inherits all the problems from the original: a) TXTs and DOCs still don't work correctly; b) the screen seems to be a lot worse now, and very reflective. Contrast is poor, background is dark. It's harder to read than the original; c) No of zoom levels are still the same (ie few, compared to, say, Kindle), and PDFs don't zoom; d) Very irksome (as it was for the original) is the very limited number of characters displayed for file names on the file list. So you literally have to guess what books you're clicking on. Worse if you'd named the books as author - title.

On the positive side, the integration with SD card now works. It now remembers the zoom settings for ebooks on the SD card. The unit I saw came with around 200 free classics, probably a plus point, but not much, as you can download them for $0 from the internet. The screen saver is customizable and the default (there's only 1 image) looks great.

Overall, it's a decent product, if you could accept the shortcomings. The worst problem with Cover Story, if I have to pick one, is the reflective screen. It is really pretty bad.

[MacEachaidh]

Thanks for the insights, greenapple. I'm disappointed that iRiver seems determined to shoot itself in the foot.

[tufty_efc]

My Cover Story has frozen after a using it for just a few hours. Anyone any help?

[CandraHusnan]

Try this:

Connect the USB cable to the computer for charging about 10 minutes, then do the soft reset (hold the Power button + Home button together for 6 seconds).

The Cover Story will restart.....

[Renji]

Originally Posted by tufty_efc

My Cover Story has frozen after a using it for just a few hours. Anyone any help?

Mine did the same thing I tried the home and power button together and it doesn't work. So try just holding the home button for maybe 30 sec it worked perfect for me!

[Skeleton]

My Iriver plus4 recognize on Cover Story firmware 1.06, new one is 1.07 ... how can I upgrade it? ... Otherwise Im very satisfied with this model. Thanx for help.

[mdmuddin]

Hi Everybody,
I have a load of epubs in right to left Arabic script and want to read them on the iriver cover. It does claim to support the most languages but they are all European ones.
Does anybody know a way of getting it to display them correctly?
Your help and suggestions will be much appreciated.

[James_Wilde]

Originally Posted by mdmuddin

Hi Everybody,
I have a load of epubs in right to left Arabic script and want to read them on the iriver cover. It does claim to support the most languages but they are all European ones.
Does anybody know a way of getting it to display them correctly?
Your help and suggestions will be much appreciated.

Based on my very meagre experience, I'd say you're on a loser there, MD. I have been experimenting with pinyin, which is a way of reproducing Chinese (and other tonal languages) in the western alphabet, with accents to indicate the tonality. Only two of the four accents reproduce, and they are accents that are found in French.

Maybe someone in here can comment on, say, the German umlaut and/or the German double s.

If you have the time and interest, you could possibly try reformatting a book with embedded font and see what happens. That worked for me with pinyin.

[ahmed_elkordy]

welcome all guys and thanks for such a great forum where i could benefit from ur experiences

i Had a problem and really need help , i live in Egypt and demanded from someone to get me iriver , the problem i dun have e reader to be sold in egypt so there is no support and i faces a bad issue
my e reader just worked for a week then suddenly my cover story began to make an occasion problem as when i use either my finger or the pen to click on the bottom of the reader while iam reading on it - that displays the option for increasing font , using dictionary taking snap shot , etc ) the device is totally frozen ! and i had to reset it and it do this all the time howver every other options in the device is functioning correctly , i even tried to upgrade the iriver version so as to overcome such probelm but the upgrade process also freeze at about 40% and i dun know really what to do ! plz help me guyz