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Old 05-02-2010, 07:03 AM   #46
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MacEachaidh,

Any updates on your iRiver? I assume you've gotten around to actually reading books on it. Any issues? How's the contrast? Weight? Easy and comfortable to hold in your hands for extended periods of time without getting tired? Easy to flip through pages? Battery life?

Any news would be appreciated. Thanks.
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Old 05-02-2010, 10:11 PM   #47
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Please try a .DOC format as well as a .TXT format if you own an iRiver Story and see if they look fine. They're unusable for me on my Story.

This is a summary of the issues I have with iRiver Story (firmware v1.71):

*1) With .DOC, you get very tiny text even at the largest zoom level. And the text is cut off at left/right margin at the highest zoom level. It is as if DOC files are treated as images. The DOC text doesn't reflow.

*2) With .TXT, the Story doesn't do word-wraps. Words are brutally broken up at the end of the lines.

3) With .JPG, you can't zoom, you can't rotate. This seems like a bad restriction when you try to read comic books. You need to squint very hard to read the words. One of the selling points that iRiver has been trying to make is its ability to read comics. I wonder about that. Comic books are rarely 6" in size.

4) With .EPUB, the font 'ink' is uneven. You get darker, thinner vertical strokes of letters such as "I", "h". Strangely this unevenness is not evident with .txt files.

5) With .PDF, in landscape, zoom is unavailable.

6) iRiver does not remember your zoom level if you read from the SD card.

* Major issues

Last edited by greenapple; 05-03-2010 at 01:03 AM.
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Old 05-03-2010, 03:44 AM   #48
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Hi all,
Sorry, this is going to be a long post. Either skim, or please bear with me.

Firstly, some good things:

I love the screen. I find it really easy to read from, completely glare-free, and a comfortable size. The display is crisp, and I quite like the black-on-slightly-grey display, as I think black-on-pure-white would prove too eye-straining. Downside: You need it to be glare-free, and I understand why they make a big deal about it being readable in full sun, because it really needs decent light to be particularly readable at all. I know you shouldn't try to read anything in dim lighting, but there are places I like to sit and read where I can read the text in a book but not from a Story. That's a pity.

(My solution: I've put some audiobooks on an SD card and keep that in the Story. If it's too dark, I read a book aurally instead.)

For me, the size and weight is quite comfortable, and having both a "Page Forward" and a "Page Back" button on both sides of the device means I can switch hands and positions with no discomfort. (I have to disclose, though, that I have hands big enough to hold a basketball in the air from the top one-handed, so that might make a difference to my comfort with the device!) But I find it light enough that I can hold it in one hand, between thumb and fingers, and read for quite a time without feeling any strain on my wrist.

As for its capabilities:

Sadly, I agree with all of greenapple's points. (Sorry, greenapple, not sad that I agree with you! Just sad that I've found the same limitations in the Story.)

.DOCs don't reflow. Opening them, they're displayed as a full page (A4 or Letter), which of course makes the text far too small to read. The zoom function merely zooms in on a rectangle in the middle of the page, and the text expands out and disappears off all four sides of the screen -- as greenapple says, as if the page is an image. The text doesn't reflow, and what disappears off the sides becomes inaccessible. I confirmed this with tech support at the Australian iRiver distributor -- they're experiencing the same thing, and they feel it may be in the new firmware, as they say nobody has ever raised the problem before (ahh, but doesn't tech support *always* say that?!). Problem is, you can't install an older firmware over a more recent one, so I can't go back to an earlier version that (allegedly) works. At my insistence, they say they have reported this to Korea, but they would make no undertaking that I'd even get a reply, let alone any time-frame for when it might be addressed.

I have the same experience with .TXTs as greenapple. Text is treated as having a certain number of fixed-width characters on a line, and when that number is reached, the text simply breaks to a new line, even if it's in the middle of a word. No attempt at hyphenation is applied, and words are apparently not seen as discrete units that must be kept whole. I wondered if there was a way to turn off right-justification, and if that might make a difference, but there doesn't seem to be.

I tried reading a comic also. The format it supports is a .CBR file, which is basically a zipped collection of .JPGs strung together in sequence so you can page through them. But you can't zoom them or display them in landscape mode, and like greenapple I found the text too small to read -- you can manage it, depending on the relative size of the text in the original, but I wouldn't want to read more than a few pages that way. Also, artwork really shows up the limits of an 8-levels-of-greyscale display: if the original was particularly intense, or had a darker or richer-hued palette without a lot of contrast, then displayed in greyscale it just looks blobby and murky. Not very pretty, I have to say.

.ePUB is about the only format I've come across that works well -- and pleasingly, I have to say. (I don't use crap like Excel in real life, so I'm not about to on my Story.) greenapple, not sure if you've discovered it, but with an .ePUB file loaded, the "Options" menu has an extra item: you can switch screen dithering on, which I felt really made the text display quite lush and pleasing. I think battery life takes a bit of a hit from this -- how much, I can't yet tell -- but so be it. I've had my Story for six days now, have read from it every night, and haven't had to recharge it yet. I figure that's not bad!

.PDFs don't reflow, either. Not even the ones with OCRd text, so that's a pain. You can't zoom in landscape, as greenapple says (an acknowledged bug in the firmware, and allegedly being worked on). In portrait, trying to zoom brings up the cryptic message "Press D-pad + ENTER to confirm". I finally worked out that "D-pad" is actually the Down arrow key, although it's not called "D-pad: anywhere else that I can discover -- not in the Getting Started Guide, nor in the PDF manual that comes pre-installed on the device, nor in the online guide that explains all the buttons and their names and functions. (I've started to get the feeling that different aspects of this device -- certainly hardware and software -- were developed by different teams who didn't talk to each other very much.) Meantime, the Story is actually trying to do a mouseless equivalent of a click-and-drag to define the area in the full-page display of the .PDF you want to zoom to ... but it doesn't reflow the text, so you're going to make the page as unreadable as the zoom of a .DOC file. It might be useful if you want to zoom in on a diagram, but otherwise ... Since the device treats every PDF as if it was a single full-page vector diagram, I'm struggling to see what benefit there is in support for the format at all.

In fact, the bloke at the distributor's tech support agreed with me, that the *only* format that works well on the iRiver Story is .ePub. A bit of a p.i.t.a., really -- that means that anything I want to read on the fly -- even .DOC attachments someone sends me in the e.mail that I might think "oh, I'll take that and read it on the train" -- still has to be physically printed out and carried as paper, or else I have to spend the time converting it to an .ePUB before it's usable. Not at all what I was hoping for. (I'm checking out Calibre to handle the .ePUB conversion.)

I don't know how responsive iRiver is going to be to these issues, how quickly they can draft a fix for at least some of them (if they can fix them at all). I imagine most eReaders have limitations -- I'm not sure where the Story sits in this pack. And I note that the company has just declared the Story's operating system open-source, so I'm *really* hoping they're not just going to wait for someone else to fix the problems.

My final thought: I'm a bit unimpressed at the profit mark-ups that seem to be going on. All the .eReader devices seem to be around similar prices, but that could be pack behaviour as much as the hardware requiring that. The only cost-intensive part of the device, as far as I can see, is the screen, and that alone doesn't justify a $400 asking-price at retail. And it comes without any sort of case or screen protection, which is really a bit much. It seems Harvey Norman has almost an exclusive on iRiver Storys here in Australia, but they knew nothing about the iRiver case for it, and *I* had to make all the phone-calls between the two to line up getting them in-stock at my local HN shop, because the distributor wouldn't sell to me directly. And then I find I can get the same case from Amazon UK, including shipping to Australia, for more than $20 cheaper than I can buy it at Harvey Norman. Not happy, Jan!!

Last edited by MacEachaidh; 05-03-2010 at 03:59 AM. Reason: To code a link for "Calibre"
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Old 05-03-2010, 05:27 AM   #49
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Thanks for the detailed reply. Your explanation will certainly help clarify matters for those considering the Story (like yours truly).

While I wasn't really paying attention to the .DOC and .TXT capabilities, their inefficiencies are still disappointing. Worse is the PDF. Some ebook retailers sell novels in PDF format, so the fact that it doesn't work well is quite disappointing.

All in all, reading about the various experiences that people on this forum have had with different devices, I can't help but feel that ereaders are far from being a refined tech. Suddenly, Amazon's reluctance to include support for PDF etc. makes sense. They probably figured why include a feature that our device will struggle with, when we could just include it in a firmware update if and when it can actually handle it. I, for one, think they did the right thing.

Seems to me everyone just rushed to jump onto the ebook bandwagon, resulting in half-assed devices that have nearly as many flaws as features. I am now seriously re-considering my decision to buy one, at least until they fix the damn bugs and radically drop the price.
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Old 05-03-2010, 06:23 AM   #50
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While I can see the big advantage of an unobstructed screen, I'm still not sure if I would want to miss the possibility to just use my fingers for touch input.
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Old 05-03-2010, 10:00 PM   #51
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Everything seems to go wrong since firmware v1.70. As it stands, Story with v1.71 is a defective product. Without any indications from iRiver, I don't think I want to go back to the older version. Some hardware will not tolerate firmware downgrade, and I'm not sure if Story is one of those.

I'm also not sure if the firmware has become abandoned ware, as iRiver has recently turned the development of the firmware to the opensource community. That is a worry.
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Old 05-04-2010, 04:02 AM   #52
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Unhappy

Quote:
Originally Posted by afa View Post
Thanks for the detailed reply. Your explanation will certainly help clarify matters for those considering the Story (like yours truly).
I hoped it would be read as constructive, so thanks for taking it that way. I didn't intend it just to be a whinge.

As greenapple suggests, I suspect a lot of these problems may be to do with the latest firmware, in which case I really hope iRiver is responsive. What I posted here, I also forwarded (slightly modified) to tech support at the iRiver US office (I think they're the home branch), so I hope they'll respond to it. They haven't yet, but it's been the weekend since I sent it, so hopefully it'll come to their attention this week.

The local support staff (at the distributor, CR Kennedy) has tried to be helpful, though they don't seem to have any more resource information than iRiver customers do. They claimed that no-one else had raised the issue with them of .DOC files, for instance, not reflowing, and I'm inclined to believe them, although by their own admission they have no facilities for incident tracking or watching trends in user issues -- it's the classic problem with tech support, where every caller who rings with the same problem gets the same response of "we have no record of anyone else raising that issue". (Well, of course you have no record if you don't actually keep them in the first place !!!) I spoke with CR Kennedy's service manager, and it was a very strange (and actually alarming) conversation. He started the conversation being defensive, supercilious and accusatory -- even though I went out of my way to say I wasn't complaining, and I recognised that they were caught in the middle with no real back=up from the iRiver company; my intent was to see if there was some way the issues could actually be raised with iRiver in such a way that they would be required to respond and I would hear an answer so I knew where I stood with the product (if necessary, in a short enough timeframe so I could return the product to the shop if there was not going to be a satisfactory resolution). Let's just say that as an outcome of the conversation, I have no confidence of that happening through the Australian distributors.

So where to go now? I'm inclined to return the product, frankly, but I don't envisage any of the competing devices being much different. I'm sure they've all got their limitations and disappointments.

Quote:
Originally Posted by afa View Post
Some ebook retailers sell novels in PDF format, so the fact that it doesn't work well is quite disappointing.

Suddenly, Amazon's reluctance to include support for PDF etc. makes sense. They probably figured why include a feature that our device will struggle with, when we could just include it in a firmware update if and when it can actually handle it. I, for one, think they did the right thing.
I suspect Amazon's lack of support for .PDF is as much to do with being unwilling to pay fees to Adobe or be beholden to that company, as with anything else.

But I have a bit of exploring to do with .PDFs before I'm satisfied to say they *won't* work. PDF is an "open-but-not-quite" format, and seems to be in the same boat as TIFF used to be -- every company does it a little differently, and has its own ideas on how it should or shouldn't be constituted and how it should behave. Even Adobe does things with PDFs that aren't included in its own SDK, so they're not exactly a known quantity. And there are different "levels" of PDFs, with varying degrees of compatibility -- so different PDFs from different sources may have different levels of success. There's no info forthcoming from iRiver as to what level of PDF the Story is designed to support, so I may have to experiment.

Quote:
Originally Posted by afa View Post
Seems to me everyone just rushed to jump onto the ebook bandwagon, resulting in half-assed devices that have nearly as many flaws as features. I am now seriously re-considering my decision to buy one, at least until they fix the damn bugs and radically drop the price.
Yeah, afa, I don't blame you. Now that I've spent the money, I think I'm going to try to make the best of it. If I have any success sorting any of this out, I'll definitely post back here.


AGAIN: sorry to be verbose, folks. I guess I don't want to post tweet-length comments that I find are often as ambiguous as they are helpful.
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Old 05-04-2010, 04:31 AM   #53
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Quote:
Originally Posted by greenapple View Post
Everything seems to go wrong since firmware v1.70. As it stands, Story with v1.71 is a defective product. Without any indications from iRiver, I don't think I want to go back to the older version. Some hardware will not tolerate firmware downgrade, and I'm not sure if Story is one of those.

I'm also not sure if the firmware has become abandoned ware, as iRiver has recently turned the development of the firmware to the opensource community. That is a worry.
I agree, greenapple, it is a worry. Though from the announcement on the iRiver website, it seems iRiver is hoping third-party developers might write auxiliary apps to run on the device, which they obviously hope will grow their customer appeal. (An integrated dictionary would be nice, for a start!) I'm not a programmer, so I don't know for sure, but I've been told the newest firmware and the open-source OS files all include APIs for the wireless network capabilities that are allegedly being beta-tested in the new hardware model(s).

I was about to say that iRiver has created a whole string of abandonware in its MP3 players, until I realised that's the nature of the industry: Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Palm, etc etc etc ... they all do the same. They stop developing firmware, and if you want expanded support for changing formats (even just to keep the device current and usable) ... well, you have to simply scrap it and buy a new device all over again. Logical as a business plan, maybe, but it doesn't seem fair to customers.

There's a fair bit of grumping going on, from what I've read, over Amazon and the Kindle. The first Kindle generation is no longer supported, so many people have been forced to buy a Kindle II, only to discover they can't transfer books they've bought and downloaded onto their Kindle to their new Kindle II; they have to be redownloaded from Amazon, and in many cases Amazon has either discontinued their availability as a downloaded, or has changed the price or other conditions, requiring the people who thought they'd bought the book the first time round to pay either a premium to make it available again, or to "buy" the book all over again.

No-one's as good as their word any more, it seems. Abandonware is the order of the day.
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Old 05-04-2010, 06:36 AM   #54
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SUCCESS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well ... partial, anyway.

I've discovered with .PDFs that you can do the following:

1) Open the PDF, and let it display on-screen as a single page
2) Hit the Zoom buuton. At the bottom of the screen, you'll see a message saying "Press D-pad and ENTER to confirm"
3) Press the Down arrow, and the Enter key
4) In the bottom right of the screen, two crop marks making an artifical "corner" appear. Use the Left or Up arrow keys to move this corner up diagonally toward the top-left corner of the screen. It will only go about one-third of the way
5) Press the ENTER key, and the screen will zoom in to show only the section of the document bounded by the top left of the screen and this artificial bottom-right corner designated by the crop marks
6) NOW press the OPTIONS key. There's a new item on the Options menu, called "Reflow ON" -- select this, and hey presto! The Story now reflows PDFs.

And now, if you press the Zoom button, it includes the words "Reflow On", and it zooms on the reflowed text (i.e. you don't have to go through the whole rigmarole I've detailed above all over again.)

So. I think this is great news. I've tested it on PDFs with text in columns, and it handles the text correctly, flowing correctly from one column to the next. Fantastic.

Now, the head-shakes. I can't immediately think of why the "Reflow" isn't the default option, and why it has to be switched on manually. Maybe there's a reason, but I can't think of one. But given that's what the OS designers chose to do, why on earth wouldn't the options to turn on Reflow and Screen dithering be included on the "Settings" menu? Why are they hidden away on the Options menu, in such a way that they only even appear under certain conditions and after you've struggled to make the document work properly? And then not even mention these options in the manual?

Perhaps we'll never know. Gakkk.

Ah well, I'm off to play with my DOCs.

More updates if I have any success.
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Old 05-04-2010, 07:54 PM   #55
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I bought my Story about 5 months ago. I remember reading an online article about this product's launch. The iRiver's top guy, who was very ambitious and optimistic about this product, has promised more formats, more features, including a dictionary, with firmware upgrades. He seemed to imply that good stuff would be added real soon.

Fast forward 5 - 6 months. We didn't get many new features, didn't get a dictionary, and we got a buggy as hell firmware. Firmware v1.70 has been out for a month and there isn't any fix for major bugs for 2 major formats.

I suspect Story isn't very profitable, and iRiver doesn't want to spend a lot of resources on it. Ebook reader market is tough. Unless you read in Korean, there're plenty of other good ebook reading products out there.

A good test of whether a product is successful is if you'd buy one for your loved ones. Right now I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
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Old 05-05-2010, 01:21 AM   #56
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I've been looking at the Story, too. But finally decided on the Sony touch. I was pretty well satisfied with my old 505 (no FW updates, but at least the 505 did work properly from beginning on, so I assumed the 600 would be similar in stability and functionality) and it was the only one reader I could get in stores. Still, there haven't been updates for the 600, but it does its stuff ok and I would say that there just hasn't been the need for a FW update.

This was one big issue I had with the Story. Getting a product that's not quite finished yet and hoping that the company fixes this was too big of a risk which I wasn't willing to take.
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Old 05-05-2010, 01:39 AM   #57
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By the way, Mike, how does the 600 handle PDFs? Reflowing and all that?
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Old 05-05-2010, 06:59 AM   #58
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If you have a text only pdf or a well formatted pdf with pictures and graphs, reflow works fine. Pdfs with graphs/pictures show the page without text first, if you turn the page, you get the reflowed text without graphs/pictures until you hit the next complete page. I find it quite pleasant how the 600 handles pdfs, and in my opinion handles them similar to adobe reader on a pc.
If you zoom in (no reflow), the page gets displayed like a big jpg (quality depends on wether you have real or image pdf) which you can just drag around like with the mouse cursors on a pc.

All in all the UI and handling of the 600 seem quite finished. The reader does what it does. Not more not less. So there are no "extra features" like calendar, games and such and most likely they never will come from Sony (maybe by having hacked FW), but it works really fine.
I've had the Sony 505 before and knew how images and text looked on it. So it was very important for me that zoom and pan work well as I read a lot of tech. pdfs. Reflow was important to have for text only documents (epub, pdf,...).
I had checked this in a local store and when I thought it should work ok for me, I jumped the fence and bought one (it was very important to me to get my hands on a unit before buying). I like Irivers design and would have gone for it, but there was nowhere to check it out. And reading this forum, I knew that "future FW updates" were supposed to improve the reader.... hmmm, doesn't sound like a finished product.

I hope this helps. But keep your eyes open. Depending on what is important for you, you should also check out the other readers on the market. I wish the 600s screen was bigger.
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Old 05-06-2010, 01:06 AM   #59
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It does help, Mike, thanks.

I would like to check other readers in the market, except there are no readers here in the market. A couple of shops have one or two, but you usually can't test them. They're sealed packs.

So the only way I have a choice of readers to pick from, is if I buy it online from somewhere and have it shipped. Either way, little chance of me giving it a test drive before buying, which is why I'm really looking to get enough information on the Net so I don't end up regretting my purchase (assuming I end up buying one at all).
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Old 05-06-2010, 02:36 AM   #60
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I think that's the best way to go, afa.

I had the same dilemma (I'm in Sydney, where are you?), and in the end went on gut instinct. I physically *saw* an iRiver in Harvey Norman, and could at least touch it and feel how solid and not-heavy it was, but they didn't have a model that worked or was loaded up ready for people to try out. I feel that's a missed opportunity -- or they were playing it safe, depending on what you think of iRiver's "work-in-progress" operating system and capabilities.

As with many things, my gut response hasn't necessarily made the best choice, but I've decided to make the most of it. I think most of the devices have drawbacks and compromises, and the Story was the one I was most visually drawn to and find the most pleasing in both a tactile and aesthetic sense. For some people that might seem completely irrelevant, but it makes a difference to my enjoyment (just as, if I really want to read a book, I'll take it in whatever format I can find it in, but by far I prefer a hardback copy with a pleasing or intriguing cover) -- it's part of the complete package.

Despite its various claims, I've come to the conclusion that the only format the iRiver Story adequately supports is ePUB. Disappointing, but it at least does that very well indeed, and I like the font it uses and the quality of the display. I've found ways to convert documents quickly to ePUB format (even though it's an extra step I really didn't want to have to take before reading a book), and it's a format that is perhaps the most supported by online e.book retailers (except Amazon, but in Australia the range of titles available from Amazon is somewhat limited anyway, largely 'coz of Amazon trying to be a 500lb gorilla over publishing rights and treating writers like a sweatshop industry. But that's another story).


I've just had a reply from iRiver to my request for technical information regarding the problems with various formats and their own lack of information, and I'm utterly dismayed (read: disgusted) at their lack of comprehension of issues and unresponsiveness to the situation.

So I'm going to hassle (lobby, stalk, whatever word you will) iRiver and try to get their OS and document support (and documentation!) improved.
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