Dear Mike,
Thank YOU for the detailed feedback. It's impressive when a developer pays the kind of attention to their customers that you do.
I haven't surveyed Chinese thesauri systematically, but two that I happen to use are《同义词词林》，上海词书出版社, 1983, and 東東同義詞詞典 (
http://www.kwuntung.net/synonym/). The latter also has some other useful Chinese language tools (backup to the root level). Online dictionaries that provide some information on synonyms and antonyms include 教育部重編國語詞典修訂本 (
http://140.111.34.46/newDict/dict/index.html) and 汉典 (
http://www.zdic.net/). I use both these dictionaries a lot.
Now about costs and pricing of online apps, specifically dictionary apps, I know that's a complicated subject. Let me offer some thoughts in the hope of stimulating discussion. These points are off the top of my head, in no particular order, although I'll try to start with more specific points and progress to more general, strategic ones.
1) I'm curious as to what constitutes intellectual property when it comes to a thesaurus. I don't know for sure -- I'm not an IP lawyer -- but my guess would be that lists of synonyms would have a weaker claim to copyright protection than say dictionary definitions, because there's less creativity and value added in the former than in the latter. In Chinese book stores, I see many pocket thesauri put out by small publishing houses, which leads me to think that these are fairly generic products. If this is true, it would imply that one should be able to license a thesaurus more inexpensively than a dictionary. Incidentally, I think thesauri work especially well in digital form, because the concept of synonymy is all about following linkages between words.
2) With reference to your comment that "Even regular-sized books seem to be set to go for $15 or so in Apple's new eBook store, and dictionaries are a lot more expensive," I would hypothesize that different economic forces operate on digital dictionaries relative to say digital novels, in the sense that there is greater substitutability between the former than between the latter. Different Chinese-English dictionaries may have different emphases and strengths, but they all serve the same basic purpose, whereas every novel tells a different story. According to this line of reasoning, the availability of free but good quality dictionaries on line should put greater downward pressure on prices of dictionaries than prices of say novels. If one can use a web browser to look up a word online for free, that puts a limit on the premium one would be willing to pay for the added convenience of having it optimized for one's mobile device. It would be interesting to test this hypothesis by looking at the decline in sales of printed dictionaries relative to printed books as a whole. I suspect the former has fallen more sharply in recent years, as free online dictionaries have become more common.
3) When I started studying Chinese (a long time ago), I used several dictionaries that were written for Chinese speakers learning English (e.g., the
Oxford Advanced Learner's English Chinese Dictionary, which I still refer to occasionally). While there is
some boundary between tools for English speakers learning Chinese versus Chinese speakers learning English, in my opinion it's not a sharp one. Therefore I would think that the market opportunity that Pleco potentially addresses is the sum of both these demographics, with native Chinese speakers representing a big potential opportunity. So referring back to your post, it does not seem unreasonable to me to think of Pleco's potential market in the millions of users. (See
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10 ... _year.html)
4) Pleco Software has been around for ten years, but -- as you know much better than I -- the market for digital reference tools on mobile devices has only really taken off in the last two years or so. This explosive growth reflects the growing ubiquity of smart phones, but the iTunes App Store has also had a huge impact. Recognizing this paradigm shift, the basic Pleco app is free. I think that's good for users, and also good for Pleco. Nevertheless, in my view, Pleco's pricing of its specialized dictionaries still reflects the legacy of the pre-App Store era. There's probably a good business case to be made for the transitional pricing strategy that you currently have, much as the Chinese economy has 摸着石头过河 from a planned to a market economy, but I don't see this as sustainable in the long run.
5) Right now, Pleco is in the enviable position of being best in class. The market for Chinese-English reference tools is still wide open, but it won't be for long. The opportunity now is to grab market share, even at the risk of reducing gross margins. This is what Amazon and Apple are doing and will do with the Kindle and iPad respectively. Pleco is not (yet ;-)) a multi-billion dollar corporation like Amazon or Apple, which limits options in some respects, but I would think that one approach might be to move away from the licensing model to a partnership model with Chinese publishers. I'm running out of time, so won't elaborate here on how that could work as a win-win solution for both, but we can continue this discussion later if you're interested.
Thanks for the useful help in response to my "specific nitpicks." While I really appreciate Pleco on iPod/iPhone's rich feature set, I think Pleco would be even greater if the interface could be simplified and made more "Apple-like."
I haven't yet purchased the full-screen handwriting module; my previous comment was based on the demo version. Playing around with this again, I no longer see the lag and incomplete rendering of strokes that I saw earlier. That may reflect a fresh launch of the app or a recent restart of my iPod Touch. What I still see now however is some jaggedness -- minor kinks in my cursive strokes. (Not directly relevant, but have you tried iShodo? It would be very cool if something like that could be incorporated into your full-screen handwriting mode.)
Finally, of course you're right, hobbyists still use the term "pleco"; my point was simply that
Hypostomus plecostomus is no longer a valid scientific name. Besides Chinese, my other major passion is keeping catfish in aquariums. Very few plecos, though, mostly African and Asian catfish. Try Googling images of "Bagarius", my user name on this forum.
