How to read Mandarin Companion's graded readers with Pleco?

Hi all. I've been studying Mandarin for about six months. I purchased the Pleco professional bundle shortly after beginning and am beyond pleased with all the features. In terms of hardware, I primarily use my iPhone 11, but also have an iPad Air 4th gen, and am very happy with Pleco's performance. All this to say: I want to keep using Pleco on apple products.

I would like to start reading. I have a strong preference for Mandarin Companion's graded readers (for pedagogical reasons), and would like to do so with Pleco's document reader. The problem is that Mandarin Companion isn't offered in a format easy for upload. The current options are either 1) purchase on paper back and use the OCR or 2) purchase the kindle file with Digital Rights Management, which effecitvely limits reading to using a Kindle or the Kindle app. I've looked into ways to strip the DRM, but apparently it's no longer possible to download the kindle files to a computer.

I understand the purpose of DRMs and respect them. But it's frustrating that we have a wonderful tool (Pleco) that is incompatible with a wonderful resource (Mandarin Companion). I guess I'm looking for some advice, surely, someone has made this work?

As an aside, I've heard rumors of a lisencing deal between Pleco and Mandarin Companion. Is this true, and if so, what timeline could we expect for their availability?
 
Last edited:

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
At the moment the only way to do this on iOS would be to take a screenshot and share that with Pleco and/or open Pleco with 'OCR last screenshot' enabled. On Android the situation is a little better since our "Screen OCR" function will let you do that without leaving your e-book reader app; unfortunately that's not technically possible on iOS.

As an aside, I've heard rumors of a lisencing deal between Pleco and Mandarin Companion. Is this true, and if so, what timeline could we expect for their availability?

Yep. Timeline is mostly on them at the moment (waiting for feedback on something) but hopefully pretty soon. There's no provision for transferring purchases from other platforms, unfortunately, so if you'd like to use them in Pleco I'm afraid you'd need to wait for our versions. (I normally keep silent about upcoming releases like this out of a desire to not cannibalize anybody's sales on another platform, but since they're the ones who leaked it I guess they're not concerned about that :)

We don't have any immediate plans to bundle them with any non-Mandarin-Companion content, so if you do end up considering any other Pleco reader purchases, you can be confident that once the Mandarin Companion ones come out you won't find out you could have gotten those other readers cheaper by waiting to buy them together.
 
We don't have any immediate plans to bundle them with any non-Mandarin-Companion content, so if you do end up considering any other Pleco reader purchases, you can be confident that once the Mandarin Companion ones come out you won't find out you could have gotten those other readers cheaper by waiting to buy them together.

Thanks for the timely response! For whatever reason I was fixated on starting with Mandarin Companion, but your post was the kick I needed to just get started. And thanks for that last point, I'll buy the Rainbow bundle and hopefully it will keep me busy long enough for the MC release!
 
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