Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
Hi dcalder
you didn't say where you live but Astak is a US company and have franchise rights for the Americas. They will use a backroom method of selling worldwide but they cannot openly do this. BeBook has a franchise for Europe and perhaps some other places although they too will figure out a way to sell worldwide. Jinke is cutting up the world and dividing it among their distributors, so don't look for much improvement when you buy outside the divided areas. Enjoy your BeBook.
Dale
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I'm in Canada, so presumably Astak would in fact
be the correct distributor for my area. Ironically, I had to go with a European distributor in order to find a convenient, professional, online order process.
There's really no need for Jinke to cut up the world and divide it between their distributors; simple economies of shipping should take care of that for them. If it doesn't - well, that's what competition's about
: the company that provides the greatest convenience and best value for the customer's money is the one that's going to get (and, frankly, deserves) the sale.
As for my BeBook - I am enjoying it, very much. While I think that my Cybook has marginally better Mobipocket software, I'm much more impressed with the BeBook's hardware. The buttons are much better located and more responsive. And the battery is an infinitely better design; if I had a spare battery for the BeBook, I could actually imagine using it, while my Cybook has only had its spare battery swapped in once since I got it, and that was just to ensure that it wasn't ruined by sitting idle. The connector for the Cybook's battery seems too fragile for me to be comfortable with switching it out frequently. I also think that the display on my BeBook seems to have very slightly better contrast than that of the Cybook.
I even like the fact that the BeBook is marginally heavier than the Cybook - it feels more substantial and "booklike" in my hand while reading. It's not quite as well-designed ergonomically as my old eBookwise, but it's definitely closer to that ideal than the Cybook is.