Friday, May 28, 2010

ebooks vs audio books vs podcasts

One of the unique features of the iriver Story is the built-in mp3 player. While many of us may use the Story for reading purposes only, the mp3 player feature really starts to make sense when you think about using it for audio books and podcasts. Imagine listening to a lecture (which many universities and evening schools already have available as downloads) and being able to read along the books or looking at sheets and graphs the lecture is referring to at the same time, all while you're on the train or in the park. Or imagine doing a language course where you will definitely need both, audio and text for better learning and understanding. What makes it even more comfortable are the easy to use navigation buttons that help to rewind, forward, stop, play and change the volume of your audio file without having to leave the book you're currently reading. In my opinion this is where the iriver Story shows its real strength and with iriver being one of the worldwide powerhouses for mp3 players, you know that the quality of this feature is excellent as well.

1 comment:

  1. Absolutely! I definitely see this as a strength of the Story, and yes, I use it myself for language study, with audio and text playing simultaneously.

    I'm really hoping PDF support will be improved in the next version of the operating system, because I'd like to be able to use it for music analysis as well. Being able to display a musical score while listening to it being played would be fantastic.

    *Please* fix the display of PDFs!

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