So I purchased an iriver Story HD:
Which at this point I fear you could probably safely call an “also ran” in the reader race. The reason I feel like you can say this is, interestingly, also a big reason I chose this particular device: Target, where the Story made its exclusive retail debut, has by all appearances given up on the device and put the remainder of its stock on sale for 50 dollars. My local branch of the hipper-than-Walmart department giant had plenty on hand but given that they were at last look still on Amazon for $95 and people were trying to move them on eBay between $70 and $130 I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s left dries up fairly quickly in the rush to take advantage of the price discontinuity, but who knows.
If you want to know what’s wrong with the thing, you know, look up a review. In a nutshell its design sense is a dowdy, its buttons-only interface is bare bones clunky for anything other than straightforward cover to cover reading, and its ergonomics are sub-par. What it offered on launch by way of compensation was a higher resolution display and built-in integration with Google Books. Showing up as it did in the midst of the majors adopting touch interface en masse, 3G connectivity and the undeniable fact that Google just does not have the profile as a media provider that an Amazon does (perhaps unfairly, as I’ll get into later) its chances were probably not great when it showed up at pretty much the same price as a the roughly equivalent Kindle or Nook. For 50 bucks, though, I thought it was worth the experiment.
I liked it as soon as I got it out of the box, but soon surmised that a lot of this was over reasons that aren't, maybe, very sensible... but are a lot like me. What I realized (on the heels of this essay) was that for once my late adopter ways had left me disappointed: I had left the electronic book go until well after the whole market was fully domesticated, and consequently not as magical and exciting. I suspect part of my hidden motivation in going off the path in this first selection was to get (or at least simulate) an experience slightly more out of the mainstream. As such its design issues are almost a plus to me - its terminally unsexy melamine-brown hospital tray back shell, it’s goofy little coffee-toned plastic chicle keypad contrasted with its up-level display and nerd-cool Google connection. I took undue pleasure in trawling the internet, over several days, for more winsome editions of free public domain literature, defying the lords of Amazon and their Whispernet as I loaded it all up on a gigabyte SD card I had sitting around, plugged into a little USB reader dongle that I also had sitting around. Bought a couple odd ball à la carte downloads for this library as well - including that Rucker short story collection I mentioned the other day (such a steal, now available in a straight .epub direct from the source). Finally to fingernail open the little door in the back of the reader to slot it, boot and just like that, a respectable library of 200+, and I got my magical moment with technology new to me, however swiftly it might be getting overshadowed in the march of the tablet paradigm.
Of course how I’m actually spending 95% of my time with the thing is reading Neal Stephenson’s Reamde that I bought from Google for the same $14.99 the Kindle or Nook edition would run me.
The primary risk of all this is that I’m steadily locking myself into an .epub file preference which is currently incompatible with Kindle. All I can say about that is, you know, get with it, Amazon. Everybody supports .epub except you. EVERYBODY.
A few negatives and a positive to wrap this up. I am not so convinced of the general superiority of the Apple Design Revolution but but really the ergonomics on this thing are a little off. Turning a page involves your thumb going either to the middle of the lower fifth or the bottom right corner, both of which just aren’t quite right. Of course it still beats wrestling with one of Stephenson’s 3.5 lb. doorstops, not to mention the vastly superior ergonomics compared to holding a conventional 200 volume library in one hand.
Still. Given that signing into your Google account can be a frequent necessity of trying to use it as anything other than read-only storage, given further that a solid 20% of the front architecture is given to the keypad, it’s hard to excuse said keypad’s lack of a numeric row and a few judicious symbol keys (. and @ and @gmail.com) - these offered instead as clumsily mapped alpha keypad alternatives visible only on a display-based “symbol” menu. Repeatedly entering my relatively strong password rapidly became infuriating.
That “repeatedly” brings in the second negative, though there is a distinct possibility that this one, or at least a large part of it, was on me. You access Google Books through your google account and actual content of these books live in Google’s cloud until you download them. If you pick stuff up via your computer they won’t show up on the reader at all until you refresh your library. Yesterday all my library refresh processes started to hang. The device didn’t crash - I could pull out of the hung update with the home button - but otherwise it would not resolve: left to itself, the reader would ultimately go into its sleep mode from which it would wake back at the home screen, library unrefreshed. I probably entered my gmail address and password 7 times fooling around trying to resolve this and experienced moments of hearty hatred for the thing in the process.
As I say this might be on me: I’d been fooling around under the hood in ways not obviously verboten but possibly (in retrospect) unjudicious: in the process of reading the box out of desperation with the glitch I discovered that it doesn’t actually support Mac OS (fucking seriously, iriver?). So the fact that I’d previously plugged it in via its mini-USB connection and been manually fooling around with files inside the drive menus that came up on my iMac might well have been what glitched it.
If not it could end up being an actually deal-breaking problem. I ended up taking it through the set-up wizard again, which wiped my settings, bookmarks, and everything in my download library, (though the latter didn’t matter because there wasn't all that much of it, and it is all in Google’s cloud). So early into owning the thing it didn’t matter much, everything was refreshed and downloaded within half an hour. If it were to become a regular occurrence however it would basically render the device unusable. Time will tell.
The only other bad thing to say is purely speculative: I’ve read enough reports about screen fragility to be concerned about it, though its clearly a far from universal occurrence. I’m crossing my fingers on that one.
An unexpected plus side is that I was basically unaware of Google Play. Early impression is that it is a promising and welcome addition to the digital media retail field. They have a lot of free stuff to boot and they’re running some interesting promotions (like the 25 cent “play of the day,” sufficiently enticing to get me to check in frequently, as is of course their intent). It’s interesting enough that it could even tempt me to stay in the iriver ecology. It remains to be seen of course if what looks like a basic commercial failure with the Story will push iriver out of the reader market entirely, or if they will rally with offerings that leverage the positives and exploit the Google relationship (bringing in Android and Chrome functionality seem like things that ought to happen). I hope they do because the Story has potential.
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