I bought an Iriver Story on the basis that it would handle .DOC files as the Sony Readers have to have such files converted to .RTF before they'll handle them. Unfortunately, the Story makes a worse mess of displaying them than a Sony Reader. The Story's talent is in displaying .PDF files and .CBZ comic book files. .DOC files tend to be rendered very small on the display, and zooming-in causes all kinds of cutting-off issues in the layout. Note-taking as implemented on the Story is messy - requiring export to a folder before it can be read outside the machine, and the results lacking any form of formatting. I'm hoping the promised note-taking on the Elonex will be better. The Elonex displays .DOC files satisfactorily, and zooming while not pretty at least displays all the information. It doesn't have as wide a repertoire of file types as other readers, but for me the handling of .DOC files is very important.