How satisfied are you with Story?

[denodan]

Originally Posted by MacEachaidh

Well, denodan, seems you're doing a bit of bitching and moaning yourself.

May have been, but realise after reading reviews of other ebook readers. The iriver Story is really great compared to many others. They all have there fair share of problems, but the iriver Story would be no worse, if not better then many on the market.

[greenapple]

iRiver should consider itself lucky for being Korean and avoid getting sued for misrepresenting the capabilities of the product.

If iRiver would just say up front that they support only 2 ebook formats: epub an pdf, I wonder how many sales would have been lost? In an old advertisement, iRiver has claimed that the reader supports a wide range of formats, and it's great for reading comics (it even has a comics folder). None of these were true by any stretch of imagination.

For a product with fairly limited capabilities, it should cost a lot less. No zooming and stretch-to-fit for pdf/pics? Even my cheap jBook could do those with ease.

[kafkaesque1978]

I absolutely love my iRiver Story. I keep meaning to write a long review about just how excellent it is. There is only one feature I would love to see and that that is the ability to edit text files. I am writing a thesis in latex and it is sad that I can open a memo and type words but I can't edit an already existing text file.

Anyway I mostly read pdfs and find that 95% of my pdf files work excellently (with perhaps 40% reflowing perfectly). Epub of course is pretty good too.

As for DOC support. Personally it is irrelevant. However the one time I did need to read a word file on my iriver story I did this: Loaded up XP in virtualbox. Loaded up word-viewer. Opened my word file. Printed it out as a pdf using pdfcreator (free xp pdf print software - that allows you to print out the word document into a pdf). Lastly I ran pdfcrop (a python script which crops out the margins). Ended up with a perfectly readable word doc (in pdf of course)

Long story short. The iRiver is nicer than my girlfriend's Sony prs600. :P

[MacEachaidh]

Then I've got a couple of responses for you, if I may, kafkaesque.

Firstly, let me ask: how do you go about accessing PDFs on the Story ? Are you talking about full-page documents - A4 or US letter - or are you talking about documents that you've created yourself, presumably formatted to fit?

I can make PDFs work too, after a fashion, if I have editing rights to the original documents and can reformat them for a page around A6 portrait in size and 28 pt, and then generate a new PDF. But that's far from my idea of a device that "supports" PDF format - is that what you were meaning, though, when you talked about PDFs?

If you've got another way of displaying them in a manner where they can be easily read, I'd really, genuinely like to hear it. I can open PDFs, and zoom in on them by defining the rectangle - a clumsy technique, but probably the best that can be done without a touchscreen - but then, without the PDF reflowing, how do you actually rad it?

Second point: don't you think that's a heckuvalot of extra work to go through - all the business of converting it to a PDF - just to read a Word document on the device? That *might* be acceptable - barely - if it was just once a week on a large document. But to do that for every thing you want to read that's in Word format ... you'd have to admit it's a hugely impractical solution. Word is a format that's supposedly supported natively on the device - you shouldn't have to be jumping through all those hoops.

But please, do tell me what if anything I've missed re PDFs. I'd be delighted to know the Story supports PDFs better than I've been giving it credit for.

[kafkaesque1978]

First off. I am not affiliated with iRiver. I am merely a happy owner. All too often those dissatisfied with their purchases are the more vocal, so I thought I would try to redress the balance (somewhat).

As to MacEachaidh's questions/responses:

I have many hundreds of pdf files, from various sources. Almost none were made by me.

In fact I specifically was holding off buying an ebook reader, until such a time as a device came along that could enable me to read most of my collection. Having tested a friend's iRiver Story, I decided enough was enough and settled on it.

I would say pdf files fall into 5 categories:

A) Totally reflowable. Breaks in page are readable. Lovely.
B) Non-reflowable but viewing the page horizontal is readable. Lovely.
C) Non-reflowable but zooming in vertical mode is readable. Lovely.
D) Non reflowable picture PDF. Often illegible. (made from scan, no OCR). Not great.
E) Doesn't load. Often too big.

So, for example I have a couple of computer manuals. For Latex and Ubuntu. They are a bit wide, but when viewed horizontal, they are perfectly legible. I have other books (like a scanned copy of Heidegger's Being and Time) which is viewable, but not amazingly legible. It certainly is readable though. Only very few of my books don't load or are totally illegible. And if I really want to read them, I have plenty of options to convert the file into something else.

EPUB is excellent. I downloaded Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' from DarwinOnline and converted to an epub in calibre. Worked brilliantly. Just as good as the pdf version I had.

As for DOC files. I don't have Word, don't want Word and don't care to read Word docs on my device. But I would hardly call the steps I outlined impractical. Last week I did the steps a number of times and it took all of about 5 minutes to get a pdf which my gf called "amazing".

Personally, I have a netbook which allows me to read all my pdf files (and doc files for that matter) indoors. The iRiver is the perfect compliment to the netbook when I need to read outside (or in the conservatory). In that regards it is absolutely excellent.

Oh and comparing it to the Sony PRS-600 (my gf's model). She can zoom into pdf files, but she has to rezoom on every page. At least the iRiver remembers the setting!

I'm going back to reading my iRiver now.

[greenapple]

Originally Posted by kafkaesque1978

Oh and comparing it to the Sony PRS-600 (my gf's model). She can zoom into pdf files, but she has to rezoom on every page. At least the iRiver remembers the setting!

iRiver Story doesn't do zooming at all, does it? All it does is crop the white spaces, which is very different from zooming. There aren't white spaces to crop with comics (in pdf/jpeg format).

[kafkaesque1978]

My big stack of Spider-Man comics weeps for your inability to zoom! But I think you're wrong though. When I crop my pdf files in vertical mode, I get a zoomed-in (easier-to-read) view. So it does zoom. Just not the kind you're looking for.

My solution for jpg comics would be to investigate mogrify and imagemagick. It can turn a stack of jpgs into pdfs (zoomed and filtered or whatever you want).

Meh, but like I have enough time to read comics.