iRiver Story stopped reading files

Question

I have no idea where to find an answer to this question, so i'll just throw it here hoping i'm not making anyone mad.

I've had an iRiver Story e-book reader for some time now; i think i got it as a present when it first appeared on the market and it's been working flawlessly since then. I mainly used it to read the books which were included on the SD card or various personal projects (PDFs, EPUBs, .txt etc.), to listen to music or to view photos.

The problem is that one day, about two or three months ago, it just stopped reading any document type except texts (.txt). If i try to open any kind of PDF or EPUB files it throws a "Failed to open file!" error and it even freezes for a period of time afterwards. It does this with all files, even those bundled with the device.

I tried looking everywhere on the web but to no avail! What's worse is that iRiver stopped making these a while ago and it also doesn't offer service anymore for it. It`s a shame, really, because it can still carry a full 6 hours of reading after all this time and it's also free of useless perks like wi-fi or touchscreen.

The FW is 1.61 and the S/W platform is 0.8.10, if it's helpful to anyone.

Thank you in advance for any advice regarding this mysterious issue!

Answer 1

At the risk of sounding flip and catty, ebook reading devices typically last for a few years -- maybe 5. Also, they are cheaper than ever. I wouldn't think it worth the effort to try to repair. E-ink devices just break down after a while; that's just what happens.

I'm not a fan of the Kindle universe, but their devices are incredibly cheap -- even the tablets.

I would focus instead on keeping an archive of content outside of your devices which you could load on all future devices. Keep the content in Dropbox, Google or a cloud-based reading system.

I personally favor an android tablet because 1)there's a lot to choose from, 2) you can download several different reading systems (including Kindle and Google Play Books and 3)FBReader. I personally don't like Kindle devices because they don't let you download alternate reading apps on them.

UPDATE: I see that the ebook store with iriver is Google Play Books. That's a further reason to find a device with the same GPB store, and you should be able to re-download your storebought content easily onto it. But you can also get the ios version of GPB if you want ipads/iphones.

With regard to troubleshooting, my best guess is that it's a file corruption issue. There's an outside chance that by swapping the sd card or resetting everything and reloading, you can fix it. But is it worth your time to try this?

RELATED: The mobileread forum about iriver https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=219