Quote:
Originally Posted by afa
Thanks for the detailed reply. Your explanation will certainly help clarify matters for those considering the Story (like yours truly).
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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
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.
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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
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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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.