The basic Story e-reader from iRiver is on sale in the United Kingdom for £229. Specs:
—Optional touchscreen, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity.
–Six-inch E Ink screen with 600-by-800 resolution and grayscale.
–ePub, PDF, TXT, Office .doc, PPT, XLS. Plays MP3, WMA and OGG audio and shows JPEG, BMP and GIF.
–2GB of RAM and SD card slot allowing up to 32GB.
–USB 2.0 slot.
–Battery life of 7000 page turns.
So, gang, is there anything to get excited about, especially at the price, equivalent to about $400? Look at the photo of the screen; notice phrases like “Author”? Does this mean searching capabilities? Or is the page merely a static summary of metadata for a particular book?
Meanwhile, assuming there’s a there there, to use Gertrude Stein’s phrase, I’m curious when this reader will debut in the U.S. SlashGear, which wrote up the unit and talked of “library optimization,” tried to find out but couldn’t.
The Kindle angle: I don’t think this will make much a dent in Kindle sales right now because of Amazon’s close integration of hardware with its e-bookstore, not to mention the iRiver unit’s price. Let’s see if the ePub interests can indeed come up with a common DRM scheme and universally usable stores within that format. Of course, I can think of a superior shortcut: no DRM or maybe social DRM.
Update on the Adobe DRM piece: Might appear here Sunday rather than today.
Related: A favorable Register review (“ideal for ePub files”), Google news roundup and YouTube ballyhoo.
If I were to get an iRiver, I’d have to name it Tam.
Just sayin’.
When comparing electronics pricing across the pond its not always accurate to do a straight currency conversion. For a variety of reasons (some competitive, some legal) european prices tend to be higher than their US equivalent. A lot of companies price the devices at the same numerical value, so a given product might sell for, say, 229 in pounds, euros, and US Dollars.
At US$400 the story would have a hard time even if it included wifi, 3G and a touch screen. On the other hand, at $229 for the stripped down version it might carve out a chunk of the Adobe market.
I’d suggest that comparing it to Kindle isn’t a fair exercise at this point in time for *any* Abode-based reader since there is no real overlap between the two ecosystems; anybody buying into Kindle is committing to Amazon for the forseable future whereas anybody buying and ADE reader is commiting to the Adobe-taxed book stores with their generally higher prices.
The whole point of locking customers in is to lock competitors out, after all, no? So, regardless of which flavor of lock-in you buy into, you’re still locked out of the other camp. Which renders their readers irrelevant.
A proper hardware comparison for the iRiver would be against Sony, nook, Bookeen, Pocketbook, Cool-er, Astak, BeBook, etc. At that point you take the book price differential out of the equation and you’re comparing hardware “apples to apples”. And since the software is basically interchangeable in the Adobe readers, it all comes down to hardware (which iRiver generally does well) and pricing.
Frankly, I think the ADE crowd is headed for a rough awakening next year (50 companies are not each going to capture 5% of the market)but that’s just because I remember what happened with “PlaysForSure”…
Thanks, Felix. Yep, that $400 of course was the converted UK price, not the actual US price, which we don’t know right now. Be fun to see what it actually is. – David
The Story is offered here (The Netherlands) generally for €329, which is outrageous, although I have seen one internet shop offering it for €299. The £229 converted would be around €255. Taxes in GB are comparable to those here, so I see no reason for the price difference other than maybe marketing reasons. The Sony Reader Touch Edition is also €299, but then, it has a touch screen. So IMHO the Story should get cheaper to be competitive.