I just completed the creation of two of my first flipbooks for my new website, and I have to admit that I can barely keep myself from jumping up and down in joy and satisfaction for how cool my flipbooks look and how much class they are going to add to my site, once I release it the public.
I do not have any special insight into the validity of the claims of plagiarism by FlipBuilder in regards to 1stFlip allegedly having stolen their code. If the charges are valid, and if 1stFlip is pushed out of business for legal or ethical issues, then I guess my comments can be applied, in the main, to Flipbuilder's product, more or less.
All I can say that, issue of price notwithstanding, this is an excellent product. If you are looking for a product that can take your PDF file and turn it in an animated, page flipping book, then Fllipbook Creator will do the job for you.
I have had much correspondence with the 1stFlip technical support team, whose replies are reasonably prompt, considerably humble, and quite helpful, no matter how long it takes to track down the problem and work together towards a clarification and a solution.
For example, for some reason we could not quite figure out, neither FlipBook Creator, nor Flipbook Creator Pro, could successfully convert a PDF I imported which was a longer combination of two other PDF files which themselves had successfully converted. The 1stFlip Team asked me to Dropbox the problematic so that they could give it a shot.
They reported that they were able to convert the file locally, but the interesting thing is that they mentioned in passing in passing that they were using Lion. On the hunch that maybe the latest and greatest Mac OS, Mavericks, 10.9.3, might not be a suitable environment for all of Flipbook Creator's work (Mavericks did convert the source PDFs for the combo file, but not the combo file), I did some testing in Mountain Lion. As it happens, Mountain Lion succeeded where Mavericks failed! Hey, so what? I'm a pragmatic guy. I got what I wanted. I just had to improvise a little.
(People wonder about the wisdom of having all of the Mac OSes installed on partitions and/or external FireWire volumes, going back to Panther? Now you know!)
Anyway, I share that anecdote to say that the program is great, but not quite perfect. The Documentation, at times, is murky and incomplete. Although it is ideally well-structured, by using text and screen captures, overall it is too minimalistic and leaves too much to the imagination of the reader. It could be cleaned up and amplified. Videos could be added to make things even better.
None of these lacks should stop you from getting this product, for the tech support can fill in the gaps of the documentation, upon request. My advice to them was to make the documentation clearer and more complete, so that they are not so burdened with inquiries that could be more widely addressed with better documentation. But what do I know? Maybe they need to keep busy to keep their jobs.