iriver Story blog and twitter

[nohmi2]

Originally Posted by greenapple

Does the PC find your Story in the explorer? When you plug your Story to the PC, on the screen of your Story, you're presented with two choices: charge the Story (default) or connect to PC for file management. You have to select the the second choice quickly. Once the selection is made, your PC will recognise Story as an external storage, and Calibre will also find the Story.

Many thanks for the reply.

Will try it out tonight, but so far it seems to be pushing for the *Battery*.
Got all of the instructions in Taiwanese from the net.

I'm too old to have to learn a new language!!!

Cheers

[greenapple]

I wouldn't want to learn a language just so I could read an instruction manual either.

[nohmi2]

........and so continues my sorry saga.

I thought that I would get my iRiver Story back to it's virginal state (so to speak!).

Put it back to it's default setting: switched off, then did a reset, switched on, and then it happily told me that the battery was fully charged, and didn't even give me the option of registering, nor the added driver.

They lie on page 21 of the manual I tell ya!

I have so far only tried it on my laptop. I'll try tomorrow on my desktop.

Pray for me.

Cheers

[MacEachaidh]

Hey nohmi2,
Do you mean that your Story doesn't come up with the screen that allows you to choose between charging the battery and connecting to your PC? Mine does that too, on occasion, and from what I've read, many ereaders that connect via USB do - it's not just iRiver that has this problem.

I usually find unplugging the USB cable from the base of the Story, then plugging it in again, seems to work. And I've found it works most reliably if I make sure the Story is switched on before plugging the USB cable in - then you have to be quick and jump on the menu option to connect, before it times out. But it is a bit bewildering, isn't it, that it doesn't seem to work predictably?

In response to some of your other questions or comments so far: are the ebooks you're trying to manage ones you've bought from online stores, or ones you've found by other means? It does make a bit of a difference. If you're converting other documents to epub format, then Calibre is a useful option, though I personally don't care for the file management side of it (just personal taste, not criticism of the program). If you;re just wanting to convert files to epub format so they display well on the Story, you might want to look at http://ebook.online-convert.com/, which does the conversion (I think it uses Calibre anyway) without your having to generate database entries for the file, or else http://code.google.com/p/sigil/wiki/ConversionChart, which provides options and tools for a range of file types. The epub editor Sigil that the second link points to is a very handy app to have if you want to modify epubs, and it's free, but it's a bit effort-intensive, and isn't nearly as automated as people are used to with apps like Microsoft Word.

Good luck with it all, nohmi2!

[nohmi2]

Many thanks for the suggestions.

I will go into the sites that you recommend, and will try PDF's and ePubs straight from the folder I have( from ADE) without converting. That will be OK won't it?
From what I remember the iRiver Story will accept them.

Cheers.

[greenapple]

You got to keep your eyes on the Story's screen as soon as you plug it to the PC's USB port. The option to select file management instead of charging only appears about a few seconds, and it'd default to charging.

[MacEachaidh]

Originally Posted by nohmi2

I will go into the sites that you recommend, and will try PDF's and ePubs straight from the folder I have( from ADE) without converting. That will be OK won't it?
From what I remember the iRiver Story will accept them.

Yes it will, though the one answer I've received so far from iRiver points out that the Story was never designed to reflow DOC files or most PDFs, so - depending on how they were formatted in the first place - you may not be able to read them very easily.

Their suggestion is to reformat the documents in the first place, and use something like 24pt for the font size to make a new PDF. That's hardly practical, I feel, and not achievable if you have the PDF but not the document it originally came from. Otherwise, some PDFs will reflow when you zoom them - when the PDF is open on the Story, if you hit the Options button, the pop-up menu will have an item saying "Reflow". Not all PDFs reflow, though, and that seems to depend on their contents and how they were generated in the first place, not on the Story's capabilities. As a format, PDF by its nature wasn't intended to be reflowable, and it's one of the formats that fares the least well in conversion to ePub. So I guess points for trying to iRiver for including support for the format, but it's not the solution it sounds like in the advertising material.

With ePubs, I tend to go in (using Sigil) and edit the font size. (You can only do this if the ePub doesn't have DRM applied, obviously.) The font size is usually specified early in the style sheet - and then, of course, you have to check that other attributes aren't applied later in the CSS that also specify a font size - and for the Story, I usually specify about 20 or 24 pt. I find that's about equivalent to a paperback book when the Story opens the file in its default setting. (The alternative is not resetting the font size, and using the middle zoom setting on an ePub, but personally I find that makes the text too big, and you get too little copy to a page. And one advantage of setting the font size in the file itself is that you don't have to alter the zoom setting - if you're reading a book off the SD chip rather than the Story's internal memory, then the Story won't remember the setting anyway on that file.)

Since the Story supports ePub, it's a bit of a pity it doesn't also support HTML, which would have made life a little easier. Ah well. I'm hoping the new firmware might improve the way the Story handles TXT files, but I'm not counting on it.

It's not quite so easy as buy the reader, plug it in, copy files across and sit down with a cup of tea and read, is it? I was hoping for that. But it seems that's true of pretty much any of the ereaders. (The Kindle might be a bit different, if you're only trying to read books pre-formatted by the publishers. I've never tried the Kindle - ironically, I bought the Story so I wouldn't feel locked into a specific format, but the only one it supports very well is ePub, so I'm effectively locked in anyway. But at least it's not to a specific vendor.)

Good luck with it all, nohmi2.

[nohmi2]

Ironically, I have 2 + Kindle 1's and I do have to jump through hoops to change the formats.

My hubby bought me the iRiver Story for specifics PDF's and ePubs of talks etc. which I want to keep permanently, and I think that he was tired of the air turning blue whilst I was working on them.

Many thanks.

[nohmi2]

I went through all of the instructions (after printing them out)and the deed is now done. I even managed to get the font size that I wanted.

Thank you so much for the help.

Cheers

[8andout]

@MacEachaidh: strange that you say that it doesn't remember font settings on a sd card, mines does. Do you have them in the /book/ subfolder?