Quote:
Originally Posted by EowynCarter
Hence my point : "making customers happy is important".
Yes, update to ePub on my Gen3, i don't feel like bookeen owns it to me. It's an added bonus. It fits into the "do stuff to make customers happy". Though i would be furious if they don't provide it after saying they would. Still, I'll take it when it comes.
The update for Opus, being bugfixes, is an other mater. Bugs have to be fixed.
And criticizing is good, insulting and bashing is not.
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I totally agree that ePub is an added bonus and we cannot complain if Bookeen will never provide it. But what if you tell your customers that you would give them this exciting new feature and so those customers are happy and looking forward to that. But you fail to deliver and after quite some time has gone by the competitors have already introduced this feature (most of them for free via fw update as well) there is still no FW update on the horizon. Would you still say that the customers are happy? And if they eventually deliver the update (let's say sometime mid next year, just a speculation). Will the customers still appreciate that or will those that need that feature have changed to the competitors a while ago and those who don't need it have no use for it anyway?
What I am trying to say is that if you get something nice for free it still can be completely invalidated by not delivering when it's needed (much like the "free ride" in Alanis Morissette's song which you get when you're already leaving). In this case it's not so much that ePub won't be useful any longer when the FW arrives but people don't want to wait buying ePub books for long because that means they cannot read until then. On the other hand they don't want to spend money on mobipocket books when they already know that they will change once the FW is here.
But what about folder view? What about the other fixes people are waiting for. There are some who do not want to change to ePub, why should they have to wait for a feature they don't want to get their fixes and improvements? Folder view has been on the list of future enhancements since I bought the Cybook in November 2007. Of course there is room for argument whether this was a promise or not but it's kind of ridiculous that after two years that feature is still on the list for the next update and we 're still not one step closer (the fact that we know by now that it is in the next update doesn't help much because in late 2007 people thought they would get it in the first quarter of 2008 and that's about the time between the Paris meeting and today and still there is nothing in view). Do you honestly think that people will still be happy about that update once it arrives after having been teased with a dangling carrot for all that time?
In this case, I as a customer, do not feel that Bookeen is taking me seriously. These devices don't live forever and even if they don't break (or the battery pack gives up and is too expensive to replace) they are exchanged after a couple of years to get a device which is more up to the current standards. By now my Cybook is already through roughly half its lifespan, so the FW upgrade is slowly losing value for me. I guess that a year from now - if the FW is still not out by then - I'll slowly but surely start looking for a new device. I won't rule out a Bookeen device entirely but competitors who fix bugs timely, expand the existing features and maybe even throw in a few new ones, get a bonus in the evaluation because their products will longer be up-to-date and a longer life span means the price divided by the years until the next purchase is lower....