Some glaring holes, and not in the plot: hands-on with the iriver Story HD

The iriver Story HD, a new e-reader making its way onto the market, is billed as the first Google eBooks-oriented reader. The construction and interface is very similar to the latest Kindle, and the WiFi version (actually, the only version) starts at the same price point of $140. But the Story HD has some features that let it stand apart from the Kindle in a favorable way. Witness the fantastic way scrolling wraps around when going through lists and the fantastic HD screen. However, some key features are missing, like the ability to search through books and options to change line spacing, fonts, and margins. The Story HD is far from a mess when it comes to straightforward e-reading, but other than the screen and some tweaks, it does little to improve upon the formula.

Physically, some of the design choices for the Story HD are questionable, and the few aspects that are unlike the Kindle are kind of ugly. In marketing pictures, the accents of the Story HD appear to be gold in color—gold QWERTY keys, gold frame. This is not the reality.

Physical attributes: buttons, bezels, and display

In reality, the back cover of the Story HD, which curls around a fraction of an inch on the front, is a weird, fallow shade of brown, of all the possible color choices in the world. The keys are actually a clear tinted plastic, not plated, roughly the same fallow color as the back. The rest of the front is white, with a long, slim silver directional pad button centered above the keyboard.

The QWERTY keyboard is accompanied by Home, Enter, Back and Option buttons (Option brings up a menu that changes depending on the context). The power switch is located on the back of the Story HD, as is an expandable storage port that takes microSD cards up to 32GB. There’s no headphone jack, so audiobooks are out. The body of the Story HD is thin, only a bit thicker than the Kindle (0.37 inches to the Kindle’s 0.335), and is lighter by about an ounce.

The buttons on the Story HD are fine for typing a couple of search keywords, but not much more than that. The directional button, which is used for navigation as well as paging, worked quite well. If you are comfortable holding the e-reader in your right hand, the page-right part of the button is aligned with where your thumb naturally rests. This is better than having to reach up with your thumb to catch the edge of the reader where the page-turning button is to turn the page, as with the Kindle.

One of the best features of the Story HD is, obviously, its HD screen. The e-reader packs a 1024×768 screen that makes all other 800×600 e-reader screens’ text look raggedy by comparison. Even though the font on the Story HD is fairly delicate and serifed, the text is very crisp, even at small sizes.

Text, margins, notes, and passages

Unlike the Nook and Kindle, the Story HD flows text right up to all the edges of the screen. This may annoy some users, but it strikes us as a practical use of screen real estate—the device already has a bezel and a sizeable bottom portion to hold onto, and it’s not like we need the margins for annotation.

The lack of margins, unfortunately, is extended metaphorically to the Story HD’s functionality: readers can’t highlight passages or add notes. Not a critical feature, but from the public annotations available on the Kindle, it’s a widely used one, and it’s a shame it’s not included on the Story HD (though Google has said they plan to release an over-the-air update that will add annotating in the coming months). Worse, you can’t search within the ebooks on this Google eBooks flagship reader. The irony: it burns us.

It’s a shame that notes can’t be made on the Story HD, because typing is easier in some ways. For example, bringing up the Symbols menu recasts each letter key as one of the symbols, meaning you don’t have to scroll around to include a period, comma, or exclamation point. (Perhaps not everyone is as driven to exclamation while reading as we are, which is your loss.) This symbols menu could have borne out an exclamation-worthy note-creating experience, and would be worth adding in a future update.

Continuing the lack of customizability, the Story HD can change font sizes, but margins, fonts, and line spacing are all fixed. If you don’t like the text pressing up against the edges of the screen or only like to read in sans-serif, you’re powerless to change it.

The book purchasing interface and search are straightforward. The default screen is a list of bestsellers, and searching for a title brings you a bunch of matches. Google eBooks has no wishlisting function, but you can get samples of books before you purchase them. One of the big draws of Google eBooks is that it has a few million free titles, in addition to a few hundred thousand paid ones. However, most of these titles are in the public domain and accessible by other e-readers through third-party websites for free, such as Internet Archive, Open Library, and others.

Hardware performance, such as it is in an e-reader

Once you’re reading, the page turns are snappy, but not markedly faster than on the Kindle. When we raced them, we didn’t notice a difference. Another nice perk of the Story HD interface is that it briefly pops up a progress bar at the bottom of the screen showing what page you’re on after the page is turned, and then hides it after a second or so to give as much screen real estate as possible to words.

The Story HD supports a large handful of formats: .pdf, epub, .txt, .doc, .ppt, .xls, .hwp, .dvju, and .fb2, as well as jpegs, bitmaps, PNG, .gif, and zipped files for comic books. If you deal with PDFs a lot, we’d note that on the Story HD you can’t adjust the contrast as you can on the Kindle, though the detail on the screen mitigates that need somewhat. In theory, you should be able to zoom in and out and scroll around PDFs on the Story HD as well, though trying to do this caused the device to crash and return us to the home screen.