Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaurnim
If there is a legal dispute which might cause the company to go bankrupt, it could influence your decision.
Not having updates might not be such a problem, but not having support and warranty can be a big pain.
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I agree, support would be an issue. It is, however, rather unlikely that Bookeen will go under entirely at the moment: they may have thought about doing a firmware with both mobi and ePub DRM but there never was one publicly available. All other cases where I might imagine Amazon having a valid case, they haven't spread it out to the public *yet*. So while it is possible for Amazon to sue them over something they will not be able to claim damages and the latter is what kills a company.
Aside from that the lack of communication, the fact that they continously don't meet their deadlines and can't even give you a new one now, half a year after the last one expired, is in my opnion more damaging than any lawsuit they could be faced with. With a lawsuit there is at least the possibility that they could win or at least not lose much. With that kind of attitude towards their customers and their serious problems with project management, I highly doubt that there will be a change for the better any time soon.
Even if I should ever get that mysterious firmware one day - by that time most features will be nothing special anymore, any other device will have had that for ages already. It will fail to bring the Cybook back on eye-level with the competition because competition has come and gone on ahead while Bookeen was still trying to get a few basic things done (mind you, I'm not talking about ePub - which is a nice gesture to give to us. But nobody asked them to put every tiny thing on hold just because they wanted to get ePub into the same firmware). After waiting for folder view since early 2008 I have pretty much given up hope that Bookeen will ever get on good terms with software development. They will, eventually, release that firmware but that will basically be the end of it. If there should be any major bugs or features missing I doubt that I will live to see the next firmware update after that.