Idea: Pleco Book Club

[mikelove]

Prompted by a recent email conversation: would you guys have any interest in some sort of subscription plan in which we licensed current / popular books in Chinese (say 1-2 per month) and made them available in our e-book reader? The relatively small volume (and consequently high per-user royalties) would probably make this fairly expensive - could end up at $100/year - but the convenience benefits would be enormous, and given the difficulties people seem to have in getting good Chinese reading material it could be well worth it for many. And it's primarily an editorial / business rather than a programming problem (maybe even something for a summer intern), which makes it a much easier thing for us to bring on somebody to manage / work on without taking time away from other improvements.

 

[dcarpent]

What kind of books did you have in mind? fiction? non-fiction? contemporary? historical? How would you decide which books to offer? Also, by "e-book reader" do you mean the current "Document File Reader," or something new (and more feature rich)? If they were true e-books with table of contents, chapter headings, pagination, etc. that could be searched, bookmarked, etc. that would be a plus. A single, long text file with no structure would be less attractive.

 

[mikelove]

What kind of books did you have in mind? fiction? non-fiction? contemporary? historical? How would you decide which books to offer? Also, by "e-book reader" do you mean the current "Document File Reader," or something new (and more feature rich)? If they were true e-books with table of contents, chapter headings, pagination, etc. that could be searched, bookmarked, etc. that would be a plus. A single, long text file with no structure would be less attractive.

All good questions.

This is all predicated on having a document reader that's up to the standards of iBooks / Kindle / etc - we're already adding basic EPUB support in our next update (and already support bookmarks), and table of contents and search would certainly be in as well before we launched this. Pagination probably too even though I really really hate the idea - too many people asking for it to continue to ignore it.

As far as the type of content, that's tougher to say - I think we'd primarily be selling fiction, since that seems to be what most people are interested in reading and since it's going to tend to have a more approachable vocabulary. And it would seem logical also to focus on books that aren't translated from another language - also probably much easier licensing-wise since there won't be as much of an issue with the rights being in conflict with those of the original publisher. But it may be determined to some extent simply by which publishers are willing to do business with us on this - most of the publishers we license dictionaries from also publish lots of non-dictionary books, but most of those tend to be of the functional / reference variety rather than enjoyable / entertaining reading, so there'd definitely be some new contacts involved here. If we were to launch this I think we'd either start it off month-to-month (so you don't need to worry about discovering that these are mostly books you aren't interested in) or announce the next few months' worth of titles in advance so you'd know what you were getting into.

I don't think we'd want to undertake our own character set conversions for all of these, so a lot of the books would probably be simplified-only if there wasn't a traditional character version that we could easily license along with it - I suppose in theory we could license some things that were written originally in traditional, but given our track record with Taiwanese publishers (and the difficulty of handling HK vocabulary for people outside of HK) I wouldn't hold my breath on that.

 

[dcarpent]

My interest would depend, then, mainly on the books offered. But another question. If ePub support is already coming with the next update, won't this mean that Pleco will be able to be used as a reader for any ePub file? Aren't there already Chinese language books available in that format? (a real, not rhetorical, question; I don't know.)

 

[mikelove]

My interest would depend, then, mainly on the books offered. But another question. If ePub support is already coming with the next update, won't this mean that Pleco will be able to be used as a reader for any ePub file? Aren't there already Chinese language books available in that format? (a real, not rhetorical, question; I don't know.)

Yes, but they're DRMed, and supporting ePub doesn't help with accessing DRMed books - DRM in ePub comes through various proprietary extensions and is not part of the ePub standard. To support one of those DRM standards, we'd need to strike a deal with whoever distributed the book, and our few attempts at that so far have been thoroughly unsuccessful (nobody wants to give away the "keys to the kingdom" and let people view books from their store in other apps).

With an unprotected ePub, you actually don't even have to wait for official support - just change its file extension to .zip, open it (either in Pleco or on your computer with another .zip file utility), and you'll see a bunch of sequentially-numbered HTML files inside of it that represent book chapters - tap on one of those to open it. (we're making this a bit easier, of course, but basically we're just going to be pulling up those HTML files in our HTML viewer)

 

[Alexis]

Cool idea. If we join the book club, can we keep any downloaded books for life? Or is there an expiry?

Could there also be an option to purchase books for download instead of paying an annual fee? My reading is very elementary, so one book would probably last me a very long time. Once my reading is better, the annual fee may be more appealing.

Just as a thought regarding grading the reading materials themselves, it would be cool if Pleco could grade a reading (probably in the screen that lists the books) by comparing with the characters that a user already knows (ie. from flashcard scorefile, import from Skritter, etc). That would be super useful for choosing the right level of material.

 

[mikelove]

Cool idea. If we join the book club, can we keep any downloaded books for life? Or is there an expiry?

Can't be sure without having signed license agreements in place, but certainly we'd aim to make these permanently downloadable.

Could there also be an option to purchase books for download instead of paying an annual fee? My reading is very elementary, so one book would probably last me a very long time. Once my reading is better, the annual fee may be more appealing.

Ideally yes, but the book club idea might simplify things on the licensing front, and would also take care of the curatorial problem that's already proving troublesome as we expand our dictionary catalog.

Just as a thought regarding grading the reading materials themselves, it would be cool if Pleco could grade a reading (probably in the screen that lists the books) by comparing with the characters that a user already knows (ie. from flashcard scorefile, import from Skritter, etc). That would be super useful for choosing the right level of material.

That one's waiting on a better text segmentation algorithm - we've thus far been unsuccessful at licensing one of those, and the best open-source one is in Java and so not usable on iOS (and too slow / memory-intensive to use on Android, actually), but we'll solve that eventually.

 

[scykei]

I don't think we'd want to undertake our own character set conversions for all of these, so a lot of the books would probably be simplified-only if there wasn't a traditional character version that we could easily license along with it - I suppose in theory we could license some things that were written originally in traditional, but given our track record with Taiwanese publishers (and the difficulty of handling HK vocabulary for people outside of HK) I wouldn't hold my breath on that.

Probably not important, but I thought I should point out anyway. As far as I know, more than 90% (random number I came up with) of all books published in Hong Kong use standard Chinese. You rarely find street Cantonese writing written in books even in Hong Kong itself. Their use of these vocabulary online is another thing, but you can only occasionally see them in comics and joke books (and also the 'learn Cantonese' books) but that's about it. Everything slightly serious like novels or educational books can be read by anyone.

Sure, there might be a certain style that Hong Kong people use in writing, and perhaps a few generally used character variants that are used in Hong Kong that are slightly different from Taiwan's (裏, 裡, 為, 爲). However, you can see people from both places preferring to use either one. It's really up to them what they want to use, and everyone would understand anyway.

So don't worry about looking for stuff from Hong Kong publishers.

 

[mikelove]

Probably not important, but I thought I should point out anyway. As far as I know, more than 90% (random number I came up with) of all books published in Hong Kong use standard Chinese. You rarely find street Cantonese writing written in books even in Hong Kong itself. Their use of these vocabulary online is another thing, but you can only occasionally see them in comics and joke books (and also the 'learn Cantonese' books) but that's about it. Everything slightly serious like novels or educational books can be read by anyone.

Interesting, didn't realize that... could definitely be a good way to get some more 繁體 material into the mix, given our continued difficulties with Taiwan. Thanks.

 

[scykei]

I'm not from Hong Kong, but I've been trying to improve my Cantonese.

I've recently posted a thread on /r/HongKong that might be relevant here. It might interest you.
http://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/commen ... cantonese/

 

[andria]

Great idea. Monthly, I'd prefer current events/issues though. A sort of magazine if you will. Fiction maybe quarterly.

Optional forums or meetups for discussion would be helpful & add stickiness / motivation. You could even organize/provide frameworks for discussion groups advertised on those meetup site. I once attended a JC class in this format. Reading & discussion around a reading on current topics. The teacher provides a gloss of key vocabulary, a reading text, & some comprehension questions. Class consists of pronunciation, comprehension checks, and discussion of the topic. It's better to have a teacher, to provide feedback and correction. So you could also market this to Mandarin tutors who lead the groups and want fresh content. It's a fun format.

(It might push me off my wall too, though I am waiting to see the new Blackberry first).

 

[character]

There's not interesting material providing a smooth transition from 300 to 3,000 characters easily importable into Pleco. I'd like to see Pleco license the Chinese Breeze books and the Graded Chinese Reader books, as a start.