back to article iRiver Story to preface WHSmith entry into e-book biz

iRiver's Story e-book reader - which Reg Hardware rated as the best product of its kind for 2009 - is to reach a bigger audience. WHSmith has chosen it to spearhead its push into the e-book biz. The newsagent will be offering a Wi-Fi equipped version of the Story, which sports a 600 x 800, 16 shades of grey E Ink display, 2GB …

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  1. Code Monkey

    Paper ain't broke - don't fix it

    For £250 you could buy 40-50 paperbacks and just read, y'know, them.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    To expensive

    if it was £20 i might buy one - but see no value in e-book readers, maybe time will prove me wrong.

  3. Sooty

    they are good

    But need to be cheaper. I have found mine to be really handy, lighter than the books i have, able to swap to the next book easily. just basically having them all to hand.

    But the readers are too expensive and in most cases, so are the books! If it's cheaper to buy a paperback and have Amazon post it to you, than get an electronic version then something has gone badly wrong with the model.

  4. BXL
    FAIL

    £250!!

    They know where they can stick that.

  5. TonyHoyle

    Wow

    £250? That's stupid money. Ereaders need to get *cheaper* not more expensive before they'll become mass market.

    And a keyboard on something that needs at most 2 keys (forward/back) is just ugly.

  6. Luke McCarthy

    Sure you've got the price right?

    I went over to WHSmith website and they're selling it for £149

    1. Dogbyte

      £149 is non-WiFi

      The non-WiFi Story is available for £149 in several places including WHSmith. £70 seems like a big premium just to add wireless connectivity.

    2. Tony Smith, Editor, Reg Hardware (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: Sure you've got the price right?

      It's £250 for the Wi-Fi version.

      WHSmith is also selling a model without Wi-Fi for £175, which it's currently discounting to £149.

  7. Jonathan Walsh
    Flame

    Too pricey?

    Not really a good deal - you can get one from play.com for £150, and on there they reckon the RRP is only £200

  8. Jonathan Walsh
    Coat

    I stand corrected

    The pricing I found was for the no wifi version - although a £100 premium just for wireless still seems a bit steep.

  9. Piloti
    IT Angle

    British thingy....

    .... what ever happened to the British I pad / table / ebook reader that was touted on El Reg many months ago.

    I know it was not British per se, imported Taiwanese / Chinese stuff, but badged as British. Actually, just like the I-Pad / I 'Phone which is the same, badged as Yanky doodle dandy!

    P.

  10. DrXym

    Sweet spot for price and features

    There will be half a dozen tablets by the end of the year, probably running android, almost certainly capable of reading books as well as other tasks and many of them will be in the £200 range. Some might even be kitted out with a Pixel Qi screen making them nice and readable.

    I reckon £99-150 is the absolute limit for an e-ink device. Any more and people will start looking at tablets. Manufacturers of ereaders could also help their sales prospects by not tying themselves to just one book format or store and supporting several popular DRMs to ensure maximum compatibility. Better yet, it would be in the interests of people like iRiver, Sony etc. and online book providers to adopt an industry standard and logo that assures cross compability of titles. Not only would it increase consumer confidence but it would put huge pressure on the likes of Amazon and Apple to conform too.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Keyboard = fail

    Ugh. Why do ebook reader designers persist with adding naff looking horrid pokey unnecessary bulk-increasing keyboards. No I'm not going to use it to 'make notes and annotations' and nor is 99% of the demographic.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Still too steep

    iRiver kit was bloody good. Ugly as sin, but always worked and I even played Doom on my IHP-140 MP3 player with hacked firmware!

    £150 sovs is still too steep for an ebook reader for me. You might as well cough up for an ACER notebook then at least you could do more with it when you weren't reading books.

  13. RaeS

    Durability? Obsolescence?

    I'm still using my iRiver must be almost 10 years on (plays mp3s for hours, FM radio fine, records my daughter's music lessons for her, only let down by not being usable with Audible). If I thought one of these ebook readers lasted as long--without becoming obsolete--they'd be a reasonable deal.

    Thinking about it, £250 was about what I paid for the mp3 player the best part of a decade ago: £25 a year = a couple of quid a month. Not a bad deal for the hardware side of things.

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