iRiver shows off its US e-book reader

iriverstory-lg1
We knew iRiver was prepping an e-book reader for the Japan market, but this is the first I’ve heard about an international one. The rather blank user interface of the Japanese Libre has been replaced with a QWERTY keyboard on this, the Story. It looks like a nice little piece of kit, but it doesn’t really set itself apart too much, though it does have a microphone — a nice feature for frequent annotators.

iriverstory-lg2

The Story has a 6-inch screen and appears to be extremely thin, maybe a quarter of an inch (specs aren’t available yet). It lacks any obvious buttons for next page, home, and that sort of thing, but the keyboard in this shots isn’t very clear so they could easily be down there. iRiver is an interesting company and frequently comes out with elegant and untried designs, though, so I wouldn’t rule out something subtle or hidden on the device.

It does have a dedicated comic book mode, I suppose for black and white comics primarily, and it’ll likely support all the popular e-book and e-publishing formats out there. iRiver’s always been good with format support. I’m sure we’ll get more official word soon — in the meantime, all we can say is hey, it looks nice.