[Baumi]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Are you a devloper yourself ?

I am, and i can easily see how the meta data could have escape them. I didn't saw it either, until such a point i tried to add new books.

I am a dev myself, too - and adding new books is just standard functionality on a book-reading device. Of course that should be tested, especially since it only takes a few seconds to do so. Furthermore, one of the most basic rues of development is: Never release an update directly before a weekend or a holiday. You should always be able to react quickly should unforseen bugs occur.

I know that everyone has been clamoring for this update for months (because Bookeen has been promising it for even longer), but when they announced availability "before the end of the year" the other day, they could easily have said something like "in the first week of January" instead, without getting any more ill will from the community.

Halas one tends to be lazy with testing things that *should* not have been touched, and thus not broken.

That's not really much of a comfort for those people who updated their Opus and are now stuck with a new firmware that has lost some functionality.

That doesn't mean that Bookeen is evil or has stupid developers - but when a project misses its original deadline that badly and is released with unfixed bugs in the very basic functionality, something in the development process has clearly gone wrong - and that's not necessarily a good sign for future products.

They'll probably release a fix for that one, and everything will be back to normal.

I hope they will, I really do - but after the eternal wait for this firmware, it also wouldn't surprise me if the bug is left unattended for months. Over the last year or so, Booken unfortunately didn't act like a company that cares much about its existing customer base - so it'll take a bit more than a long-overdue, buggy firmware update to convince me they've changed their ways.

IMHO, the proper course of action now would be a public acknowledgement of the bug coupled with a warning on the firmware download page and maybe a d/l option for the current 1.9 firmware (so people can decide for themselves if they'd rather have occasional crashes or buggy epub imports) and an ETA on an updated firmware. If it really is a small bug, it shouldn't take more than a month to fix - including testing. If sudden complications delay it, the devs can drop a few lines about that on the blog, as well. That way, their customers know the company cares about them and improving their software. And Bookeen should care about their customer base - with so many new e-readers coming out in 2010 (most of them based on the same or very similar hardware as Bookeen's products), people are easily tempted to switch to a competing product if they're not happy with their current reader.

You've seen what happens when a company doesn't communicate: Not everybody is as patient as you are, and quite a few people here aren't recommending Bookeen's products to people anymore, not because of any terminal flaw in the software but because the company's lack of communication frustrated them. A few words of explanation every once in a while could have easily prevented that. (It's not only Bookeen - quite a similar thing is currently happening to txtr in Germany who couldn't live up to the buzz they created themselves and are feeling the backlash now.)

That said, I'll officially and publicly applaud Bookeen if they manage to either solve this bug in a timely manner or communicate clearly why it's not trivial to fix it.