My iRiver Story

[sceadugenga]

I'm now the proud owner of an iRiver story.
My Mum, who's nearly 90, summonsed me to the mall to meet her and my father (who is 90) to look at eBook readers as she wanted to be at the cutting edge of new reading technology.

To cut a long story short she whipped out her plastic card and bought two iRiver Storys with little input from me, they just happened to be the most expensive in the shop, and gave one to me.

Now it's too late for "should haves", what I have is what I've got, and due to travel commitments I have had little time to play with it up till now.
I have found out that my computer wont talk to it if plugged in directly. But if the memory cardis removed and put in the computer it askes to reformat the card. I run on Windows XP.

Any advice on that and any other iRiver Story quirks appreciated.
No hurry, I have about a dozen new hard copy books to wade through first.

Edit: And comics, can I get a bigger card and load comics onto it? Do I need a comic reader downloaded onto it?

[Janine R]

Oh, I am so with you! I bought a Story last week and am so disappointed with it that I can barely look at it. Why aren't there any instructions to the wretched thing? I don't even know if it is working properly because I don't know what it's supposed to do. Sometimes my computer seems to recognize it; other times it doesn't. Is there anywhere a decent instruction manual to this thing?

[patrickt]

I went to see if they had a manual on line and didn't find one but they did have a number of firmware revisions. Perhaps you need to update firmware to connect to your computer?

[James_Wilde]

I also own an Iriver Story, which I bought about a month ago. It was one of only two which are generally available here in Sweden at the time I bought it. I looked around, and I think I'd have liked to get the B&N nook, but I opted out of faking my address in the US just in case anything happened and I had to send it back. That or the Kobo would have been my first choices but the Kobo's not available outside of Canada and the antipodes yet, maybe the US too.

The Story is good enough. In Sweden it comes with 100 free epub books from gutenberg.org and of those 100 probably 40 are books I enjoy reading, and 40 more are books I have been meaning to read. I've loaded a number of new epubs on there, and I'm satisfied, as epub is the standard I hope will become a standard. It seems to be the format supported by most e-readers I've looked at, far more than mobi, for example, which is another non-store-specific standard. I've seen reports that it doesn't do very well with doc and txt files, but then I've got a laptop for those. I wouldn't use an e-reader for pdf either.

The manual looks like it was translated from Klingon to English by a North Korean, and Iriver's online help is abysmal, but with a bit of testing you can get most things sorted.

If you're stuck for help, there's an Iriver forum in here where the user-generated help is phenomenal. I expect to see you all in there.

[bear4hunter]

I had the chance to play with it at the local bookstore (Germany) - I already had Kindle 2 adnd DX in my hands by that time.
The only thing I liked about the iRiver Story was the screen, but I disliked the housing, it looked and felt so cheap, I though I was holding a very cheap copy of a cheap copy of a Kindle.

For the look and feel, I very much liked the Sony PRS 600 Touch Edition, but the screen is horrible! Not to forget: unjustified text looks horrible too...

That's why for epubs, now a PocketBook 302 is on it's way to me now