MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - iRiver Cover Story Owners Gather! + Review

silv · 09-29-2010, 05:17 PM

Hi guys, after doing lots of research and reading tons of reviews I decided that it is finally time to buy an ebook reader - I decided for the iRiver Cover Story. It arrived 2 weeks ago and since then I have tested all important file formats: doc, docx, ppt, pptx, pdf, chm, even CBZ (I'm an avid comic reader). So if you have any pre-buy questions or want to share your experience, post it here!

First of all the file format support is awesome! I'm a bit of a tech nerd myself and I like to have a flexible non-propietary software. I've been following the ebook reader development ever since the first announcement of the PlasticLogic reader and know pretty much all devices and to my surprise iRiver and HanLin are the only companies on this planet that ships ebook readers with NATIVE POWERPOINT (ppt, pptx) support! This was a major purchasing factor for me because of my academic background. I need to carry tens if not hundreds of ppt files and some courses have 20-30 files each! It would consume too much time to convert every powerpoint file into pdf before reading, not mentioning that campus computers often don't allow the installation of 3rd party software and complex graphics get often lost during conversion. In other words, I wanted a hassle-free e-ink reader for academics!

The Cover Story feels solid and heavy in your hands. It weighs around 270g which is significant heavier than my previous Cybook Gen 3 reader with only 180g. It comes with a built-in 360° accelerator and an automatic screen rotation. A handy feature because you can now easily switch hands while reading. The border around the screen is a little bit too slim to hold comfortably. I'm often tempted to hold the reader with my thumb on the touchscreen and accidentally triggering the page turn. But like everything the real drawbacks are often discovered during daily usage. That's why I want to mention a few things that could significantly influence your buying decision.

The first thing is pdf support. Cover Story comes with two modes: pdf reflow and auto margin cutting. Pdf reflow mode that reformats difficult pdf files and let you increase the text size yourself. Margin cutting lets you set a fixed common margin for all pdf pages so that a page turn automatically cuts the margin, displaying only the content that you want to see. This is very useful if your pdf files have a fixed margin on the right, left, top and bottom. This feature allows you to zoom into a fixed part of the page, but it's not possible to move the area freely on that zoom level. Means if you want to zoom in and manually move around, you have to go back to full page and set new margins. What a hassle!
Pdf reflow on the other hand works similar to sony and pocketbook reader. The text is reformatted and text size can be changed into 6 or 7 levels. The problem comes with the content itself. Scientific symbols and mathematical formulas are totally broken and unusable in reflow mode. Even the most basic mathematical formula like f(x)=ax+b gets broken down into

"f
x
ax
b"

symbols like = or + are totally ignored. One explanation is that the reader is unable to render symbols from Latex programmed pdf files. In other words there is no way to read an even remotely scientific ebook as pdf file, but there is a neat work around. Cover Story comes with an excellent PNG, JPG and ZIP aka CBZ image viewer. I tested it by converting the math ebook into PNG, then zipped the folder and renamed the file ending to .cbz and it worked! The text is very readable as png file and all graphics are kept intact as well. The image viewer of Cover Story works very well in zip archives and even remembers the last page you were reading, which is very convenient for comic & manga readers. I was really surprised how well this worked as I could set the reader to display the full page or only part of it in landscape mode. The Cover Story software is really optimized for manga reading, as it even allows you to change the reading direction from left to right (comic, manwha style) or right to left (manga style). And since you don't need to convert the manga into LFT like compared to the sony reader it has become a daily routine to drag and drop new manga chapters directly on the reader before driving to campus. A powerful feature! Complex formatted ebooks can easily be converted into images and read as cbz. A powerful feature which makes the Cover Story THE MOST FLEXIBLE READER out there! Well done iRiver! I just wished they'd added a better zoom feature with zoom lock like Sony's Prs 600+. As already mentioned the strong point of Cover Story are the huge variety of file formats it natively supports. Especially the support of my powerpoint files outweigh many hassle with the software and if that's not enough for you, you can always write your own app! The best thing is that the Cover Story software is OPEN SOURCE! You can run your own linux apps. With this the ereader is surely one of the contenders for the best e-reader on the market, even compared to Pocketbook 60x and Sony Prs 650+ and especially against Kindle 3 which has a lousy file support.

However, the flaw of Cover Story comes with the touchscreen! Yes, the touchscreen is neat and it's fun to press on the page directly to turn pages or draw sketches on the book. But it is not accurate! First of all the screen is just 6 inches and pretty small. A screen of that size naturally offers little writing space for notetaking, so one expects the screen to be as accurate as possible to write small text, but the low accuracy and unresponsiveness of the touchlayer makes it comparable with the resistive touchscreen of an iPad. The strokes are too thick and the curves to wide for any serious notetaking. It is barely responsive enough for doodling and drawing simple street maps so I guess it is not completely useless. One could use it for very rough sketches to show street descriptions to passengers or use it as magic board for elementary school kids. Besides that there isn't much usage. To be fair I didn't expect a Wacom accuracy nor use it for advanced drawing. But I expected the features to be somewhat useful, but the low accuracy really makes my good handwriting look like abstract drawing. It's no wonder that they included an ugly self portrait on the Cover Story homepage. It's simply not possible to draw anything better!

To make it worse they put the touchlayer, like the Sony Prs 600, on top of the eink screen

Everybody who owns a Sony Prs 600 or read about it knows what this means:

- annoying reflection at day by the sun and at night by your lamps
- considerably decreased contrast
- requires almost direct light in order to see through the eink screen, which again is reflected and thus devilish circle of reflection and low contrasts repeats

Here is an image of the screen, since I have no digicam I don't have hi-res photos. But I found some photos in the internet which shows the problem quite accurately. Maybe someone else can add more photos in higher resolution.

Because it has only 8 greylevels the majority of the image and text look like the text "Now books become digital". This contrast is way too low for comfortable reading. Thus it becomes almost impossible to read the reader outdoors afternoon, even if it's still bright.

It also seems like all touchscreen based ereaders have considerably decreased battery life! My Cover Story for example gave up 1 of 3 bars after just 2 hours of usage. And after just 3 days of standby the battery is completely dead. The same thing happens to Sony 6x, Pocketbook and all other touchscreen readers. All touchscreen technologies constantly drain the energy from the batteries. This is simply the price you pay for a touchscreen. But the charging time of the Cover Story takes up min. 5 hours! During that time you can continue to read your ebook, but it takes up 8 or even 10h before you've fully recharged your ebook! All in all I wished iRiver had removed the touchscreen from the Cover Story! The wide file format support alone would've made it the perfect ereader! Maybe the next generation comes with a Pearl screen and Wacom touch. All in all the Cover Story is a very good ereader with a superb software, but old battery generation and a reflective touchlayer that spoils it all. My final rating is:

Pros:
+ native support for MS office file formats: doc, docx, xls, even Powerpoint!
+ PDF reflow, margin cropping
+ superb Zip support, reads and recognizes CBZ files and even let you change reading direction (right -> left or left -> right)
+ dictionary Oxford English
+ 360° accelerator
+ mp3 player plays even during ebook reading, standard headphone jacket
+ flash support card up tp 32 GB
+ very and clean design, built quality very sturdy and good
+ opensource reader software
(+) comes with many interesting free ebooks preinstalled

Cons:
- reflective touchlayer on top of eink
- low contrast and blurry screen
- battery life nowhere near 7000 page turns, more like 2000-3000, stand-by time max. 72 hours (without wifi and without reading)
- no manual zoom of images

7 out of 10 STARS

09-29-2010, 05:17 PM	#1
silv Member Posts: 10 Karma: 172 Join Date: Sep 2010 Device: iRiver Cover Story & Cybook Gen3	iRiver Cover Story Review Hi guys, after doing lots of research and reading tons of reviews I decided that it is finally time to buy an ebook reader - I decided for the iRiver Cover Story. It arrived 2 weeks ago and since then I have tested all important file formats: doc, docx, ppt, pptx, pdf, chm, even CBZ (I'm an avid comic reader). So if you have any pre-buy questions or want to share your experience, post it here! First of all the file format support is awesome! I'm a bit of a tech nerd myself and I like to have a flexible non-propietary software. I've been following the ebook reader development ever since the first announcement of the PlasticLogic reader and know pretty much all devices and to my surprise iRiver and HanLin are the only companies on this planet that ships ebook readers with NATIVE POWERPOINT (ppt, pptx) support! This was a major purchasing factor for me because of my academic background. I need to carry tens if not hundreds of ppt files and some courses have 20-30 files each! It would consume too much time to convert every powerpoint file into pdf before reading, not mentioning that campus computers often don't allow the installation of 3rd party software and complex graphics get often lost during conversion. In other words, I wanted a hassle-free e-ink reader for academics! The Cover Story feels solid and heavy in your hands. It weighs around 270g which is significant heavier than my previous Cybook Gen 3 reader with only 180g. It comes with a built-in 360° accelerator and an automatic screen rotation. A handy feature because you can now easily switch hands while reading. The border around the screen is a little bit too slim to hold comfortably. I'm often tempted to hold the reader with my thumb on the touchscreen and accidentally triggering the page turn. But like everything the real drawbacks are often discovered during daily usage. That's why I want to mention a few things that could significantly influence your buying decision. The first thing is pdf support. Cover Story comes with two modes: pdf reflow and auto margin cutting. Pdf reflow mode that reformats difficult pdf files and let you increase the text size yourself. Margin cutting lets you set a fixed common margin for all pdf pages so that a page turn automatically cuts the margin, displaying only the content that you want to see. This is very useful if your pdf files have a fixed margin on the right, left, top and bottom. This feature allows you to zoom into a fixed part of the page, but it's not possible to move the area freely on that zoom level. Means if you want to zoom in and manually move around, you have to go back to full page and set new margins. What a hassle! Pdf reflow on the other hand works similar to sony and pocketbook reader. The text is reformatted and text size can be changed into 6 or 7 levels. The problem comes with the content itself. Scientific symbols and mathematical formulas are totally broken and unusable in reflow mode. Even the most basic mathematical formula like f(x)=ax+b gets broken down into "f x ax b" symbols like = or + are totally ignored. One explanation is that the reader is unable to render symbols from Latex programmed pdf files. In other words there is no way to read an even remotely scientific ebook as pdf file, but there is a neat work around. Cover Story comes with an excellent PNG, JPG and ZIP aka CBZ image viewer. I tested it by converting the math ebook into PNG, then zipped the folder and renamed the file ending to .cbz and it worked! The text is very readable as png file and all graphics are kept intact as well. The image viewer of Cover Story works very well in zip archives and even remembers the last page you were reading, which is very convenient for comic & manga readers. I was really surprised how well this worked as I could set the reader to display the full page or only part of it in landscape mode. The Cover Story software is really optimized for manga reading, as it even allows you to change the reading direction from left to right (comic, manwha style) or right to left (manga style). And since you don't need to convert the manga into LFT like compared to the sony reader it has become a daily routine to drag and drop new manga chapters directly on the reader before driving to campus. A powerful feature! Complex formatted ebooks can easily be converted into images and read as cbz. A powerful feature which makes the Cover Story THE MOST FLEXIBLE READER out there! Well done iRiver! I just wished they'd added a better zoom feature with zoom lock like Sony's Prs 600+. As already mentioned the strong point of Cover Story are the huge variety of file formats it natively supports. Especially the support of my powerpoint files outweigh many hassle with the software and if that's not enough for you, you can always write your own app! The best thing is that the Cover Story software is OPEN SOURCE! You can run your own linux apps. With this the ereader is surely one of the contenders for the best e-reader on the market, even compared to Pocketbook 60x and Sony Prs 650+ and especially against Kindle 3 which has a lousy file support. However, the flaw of Cover Story comes with the touchscreen! Yes, the touchscreen is neat and it's fun to press on the page directly to turn pages or draw sketches on the book. But it is not accurate! First of all the screen is just 6 inches and pretty small. A screen of that size naturally offers little writing space for notetaking, so one expects the screen to be as accurate as possible to write small text, but the low accuracy and unresponsiveness of the touchlayer makes it comparable with the resistive touchscreen of an iPad. The strokes are too thick and the curves to wide for any serious notetaking. It is barely responsive enough for doodling and drawing simple street maps so I guess it is not completely useless. One could use it for very rough sketches to show street descriptions to passengers or use it as magic board for elementary school kids. Besides that there isn't much usage. To be fair I didn't expect a Wacom accuracy nor use it for advanced drawing. But I expected the features to be somewhat useful, but the low accuracy really makes my good handwriting look like abstract drawing. It's no wonder that they included an ugly self portrait on the Cover Story homepage. It's simply not possible to draw anything better! To make it worse they put the touchlayer, like the Sony Prs 600, on top of the eink screen Everybody who owns a Sony Prs 600 or read about it knows what this means: - annoying reflection at day by the sun and at night by your lamps - considerably decreased contrast - requires almost direct light in order to see through the eink screen, which again is reflected and thus devilish circle of reflection and low contrasts repeats Here is an image of the screen, since I have no digicam I don't have hi-res photos. But I found some photos in the internet which shows the problem quite accurately. Maybe someone else can add more photos in higher resolution. Because it has only 8 greylevels the majority of the image and text look like the text "Now books become digital". This contrast is way too low for comfortable reading. Thus it becomes almost impossible to read the reader outdoors afternoon, even if it's still bright. It also seems like all touchscreen based ereaders have considerably decreased battery life! My Cover Story for example gave up 1 of 3 bars after just 2 hours of usage. And after just 3 days of standby the battery is completely dead. The same thing happens to Sony 6x, Pocketbook and all other touchscreen readers. All touchscreen technologies constantly drain the energy from the batteries. This is simply the price you pay for a touchscreen. But the charging time of the Cover Story takes up min. 5 hours! During that time you can continue to read your ebook, but it takes up 8 or even 10h before you've fully recharged your ebook! All in all I wished iRiver had removed the touchscreen from the Cover Story! The wide file format support alone would've made it the perfect ereader! Maybe the next generation comes with a Pearl screen and Wacom touch. All in all the Cover Story is a very good ereader with a superb software, but old battery generation and a reflective touchlayer that spoils it all. My final rating is: Pros: + native support for MS office file formats: doc, docx, xls, even Powerpoint! + PDF reflow, margin cropping + superb Zip support, reads and recognizes CBZ files and even let you change reading direction (right -> left or left -> right) + dictionary Oxford English + 360° accelerator + mp3 player plays even during ebook reading, standard headphone jacket + flash support card up tp 32 GB + very and clean design, built quality very sturdy and good + opensource reader software (+) comes with many interesting free ebooks preinstalled Cons: - reflective touchlayer on top of eink - low contrast and blurry screen - battery life nowhere near 7000 page turns, more like 2000-3000, stand-by time max. 72 hours (without wifi and without reading) - no manual zoom of images 7 out of 10 STARS Last edited by silv; 10-01-2010 at 09:27 AM.