The iRiver ebook reader has clearly taken its design inspiration from the Kindle. You get the Kindle’s feel and appearance – the 8 x 5x 0.4-inch frame, the smooth matte finish, and the integrated keyboard below the 800 x 600 6-inch eInk screen, the page turn buttons flanking both sides of the screen. Yet without wireless 3G services and built-in eReader, can the iRiver Story eBook Reader hold up its own candle against its more advanced counterparts?
Features – Hardware and Software
 

What the iRiver Story eBook Reader doesn’t have is the richness of Kindle’s grey levels.
Nevertheless, text and images are still clear and comfortable to read on the Story’s 8 grayscale screen.

Getting content to your Story is a simple drag and drop affair from a PC or Mac. There’s a 2GB hard drive that can hold up to 1500 ebooks – that more than a year or two of reading, even for a voracious reader. If you want to expand your library, there’s an SD card slot located at the base of the device; it can handle up to 32GB cards.

Also found at the bottom of the eReader are: a mini-USB port, power/lock switch, and a headphone jack. A glance at the back of the iRiver ebook reader reveals the integrated speaker, which is useful for listening to audiobooks, recorded memos and lectures (the Story has a microphone, too), and music.

The Story can handle up to 9000 pages or 24 hours of audio per charge. Unlike the Kindle, the device easily gets along with other devices in the market as it supports both Adobe DRM and non-DRM. The wide ebook format support (ePub, DOC, XLS, PPT, etc) is great news for any reader. The Story can also display graphs and images in documents as well as comics and graphic novels in JPG, BMP, and GIF formats. Pages can be set into portrait or landscape mode. 

There are also handy extra features that students and professionals will love: the Story lets you create notes, edit texts, and runs searches.     

The Bottom Line

With its huge storage space, long battery life, and note-taking and other handy supplementary features, the Story is for any reader who wants good return for their money.