The e-book reader market bigwigs, Amazon and Sony, have more competition coming their way - with the well-known South Korean MP3 player maker, iRiver, launching its 'Story' e-reader in the UK.

Saying that the 'Story' is essentially "stepping up to challenge Sony's Reader and Amazon's new Kindle," iRiver elaborated that its forthcoming e-reader features a QWERTY keyboard which will enable users to edit documents as well as interact with an on-board diary and scheduler.

The fairly unembellished 'Story' has a 6-inch 800 x 600 e-ink screen and will be available in a slightly off-white matte color. Boasting 7000 page turns from a single charge of its battery, the 'Story' is compatible with epub, pdf and txt formats. In addition, it also displays office files like doc, ppt and xls; and image formats like jpeg, bmp and gif, in greyscale.

Some of the other features of the iRiver 'Story' include 2GB on-board flash memory and an SD card slot, for adding 32GB storage, to accommodate nearly 1500 books. The device's optional Wi-Fi facilitates the content loading process by connecting to the user's computer via USB 2.0.

Furthermore, the £230-priced iRiver 'Story' also features a voice recorder and headphone jack, along with a built-in speaker that can not only play music or an audiobook, but can also continue playback while a reader reads the on-screen content.