[MacEachaidh]

I'm sure you're right, 8andout. Look at the way the Story reads TXT documents: it treats it all - words, punctuation and spaces - as undifferentiated characters, and simply breaks the stream and wraps to the next line after a certain number of characters, even if that's in the middle of a word. That's the way Korean writing works, too. I have another iRiver product - the B30 mp3 player/DAB+ radio - and the menus on that handle text exactly the same way.

So I don't think it's just because the product is new, or non-English. It's the way the software's been designed and coded. I would have thought it was a matter of iRiver (hopefully) realising that if it's going to sell into markets involving Western languages, then it has to handle text better (in the OS as well as in TXT files). But you know what? I read a *lot* of reviews before buying both the Story and the B30, and I never encountered this flagged as an issue in any other reviews I read. Maybe people don't see it as a problem, so why should iRiver.

But I doubt the poor display handling of some file formats is language-related. A Word document is a Word document, regardless of what language it contains.

Ultimately, I don't blame the support people at the distributors directly for not having knowledge about the products, and especially about any shortcomings and how to fix them. As you point out, they get no more info from iRiver than we do. But they do have an access to the company and a marketing leverage that we don't have, and I really wish they would put their collective feet down with iRiver and say "if you want us to sell these devices, you have to give us some info". The support people at the distributors in my country told me to send any issues, questions or requests to them in an e.mail, but then acknowledged they have no procedures even to store that e.mail and get a reply to me if/when they got an answer back from iRiver - they told me to ring them "in a few weeks" and see if anyone had heard anything - let alone anything like an incident tracking system or the ability to follow-up questions they didn't get replies to. If iRiver products were seriously el-cheapo, I'd probably figure that was to be expected, thinking you get what you pay for; but they're not - the Story is one of the more expensive e.Readers around.