Cheng & Tsui - new forums for user feedback

[lanrui]

Hi everyone,

I'm an editor at Cheng & Tsui -- the publisher of Integrated Chinese and a whole bunch of other Chinese textbooks -- and I wanted to let you know that we recently set up some new forums on our website that you can use to communicate your feedback about our books. Love 'em, hate 'em, have ideas for other books we should publish -- we want to know. I know every company says they care about their customers' opinions, but we are more serious than most about getting input from both students and teachers who have used our books, and we really do want to hear your ideas and criticisms.

http://www.cheng-tsui.com/forum

I should also make it clear that we're not lurking on chinese-forums.com trying to promote our products or anything -- in fact, I just registered so I could post this message. We always find it interesting to read your reviews of our books here, but we are not the kind of company that would ever post about ourselves in any sort of sneaky way.

Best wishes for successful Chinese learning!

[shibole]

Thanks for doing this. I have posted my feedback on your site.

[roddy]

You're also welcome to post on here - there are no objections to commercial posts as long as they're up front about what they are and of value for the members. You'd probably be in a position to help out with requests for textbook recommendations, responding to comments on textbooks, etc.

[venture160]

Thank you, I Have used a number of your books in the past including "Close The Deal" which I feel is the best business Chinese book out there.

I hope you frequently post at this forum!

[lanrui]

Thanks for the welcome, everyone! I can't promise that we'll be posting on chinese-forums.com regularly (just because we're a small company and everyone's pretty busy), so if you want to ask us questions directly it's probably most efficient to use the cheng-tsui.com forums. But we will definitely try to keep checking in here now and then. It's great to see such an enthusiastic and helpful community of Chinese learners!

[mirgcire]

While I appreciate your efforts at Cheng & Tsui, I feel Chinese-Forums is a much better place to post candid appraisals of your materials. I think some of you books are great and some are terrible. I am more comfortable posting my comments on the site of a neutral 3rd party than risking my comments will be viewed as "offensive" and removed.

For example, I think that "Integrated Chinese" has some strong points, but the audio materials are awful. I would never recomend this text to a beginner. On the flip side, "Making Connections" has fantastic audio, but a poorly developed textbook.

Instead of creating your own site which is obviously not getting much attention, perhaps you could negotiate with the Chinese-forums.com to have them host a forum for you.

[lanrui]

Thanks for your comments, mirgcire. By all means, these forums are a nice place to discuss textbooks -- it's great because there's already such a large community!

However, I'm not kidding when I say that Cheng & Tsui honestly does like to hear negative criticism as well as positive praise. We really do take user feedback into account when we do revisions and new editions; it's tremendously helpful in figuring out what works for students and what we can do better.

So if you want your feedback to be considered by us, please do feel free to post it on our forum, or email us directly -- even if you hated the book, we want to know why so we can do better next time!

[venture160]

I found a number of minor mistakes in open for business, when I get a chance I'll write them up and post them on this forum. I bought the book in winter 2006, so it may have been an early edition. Sorry, but I too prefer to post on Chinese-forums.

[wrbt]

One thing I don't understand with Cheng & Tsui is the outdated format of some of the media available for their textbooks. Beyond the Basics and A New Text For A Modern China are both solid intermediate textbooks with diverse content that would be useful for anyone trying to get over the hump from textbooks to authentic material, yet the essential component of listening practice is only available on cassette.

I assume C&T's primary customer base is in the United States where there are probably freshman in college who would look at a cassette tape and wonder what it is... is it simply because of existing stock that the switch isn't made to CDs of MP3s or WMAs? Having digital format audio component is no longer a neato thing it's an expected thing

[roddy]

I'd certainly applaud any publisher who starts moving towards digital formats. Here in China there is far too much produced which is either tape only, or CDs which are just recorded directly from tape. Given that people are going to put audio material into a digital format anyway so they can use it as they wish, you might as well do it for them and then you can add your own DRM.

Thinking in this direction, I'd also like to see more ebooks for learning Chinese. I reckon there's a potential market here, not least due to the way Pleco's products have popularized PDA use among Chinese learners.

[shibole]

Yea, I was thinking a cdrom of MP3s would be preferable to normal audio CDs, or better yet hybrid CDs with normal CD audio and MP3s.

I also feel like the CDs are too expensive, but I guess 4 CDs for $40 isn't too unreasonable.

[imron]

DRM is ineffective and defective by design. People will always be able to find a way to copy it if they so desire, and usually it only takes a google search to find out how. Given that people who want to be able to pirate it, will find the means to do so, the problem then becomes how much to you want to annoy your valid customers by using DRM. E.g. say you decide to go with DRM'd wma files, then basically everyone who wants to play the recordings on their ipod has to waste a bunch of time converting everything to mp3. If you're going to go digitial, your customers will thank you more if you stick with something open.

[roddy]

What I was thinking, but didn't really explain, is that if people are recording from tape or CD, they're going to do it to mp3 and once you've done that it's easily given to others, uploaded to P2P, etc. However, if you give students DRM-protected files that they can use on their PC +/- mp3 player they've got the digital format that I think most of us want.

That said I haven't really thought it through. Plus I think publishers might get extra brownie points for giving us mp3's we can use any way we want, and as the recordings aren't all that much use without the books anyway I'm not sure how much of an issue it is.

[imron]

they're going to do it to mp3 and once you've done that it's easily given to others, uploaded to P2P, etc. However, if you give students DRM-protected files that they can use on their PC +/- mp3 player they've got the digital format that I think most of us want.

The thing is, it's no more difficult to convert a DRM'd file to an mp3, than it is to convert it from the media you listed above (and in fact it's probably easier to do than converting a cassette). And people are going to do that anyway because they want to be able to play the recordings on any device they own, be it an mp3 player, a cd-player in their car etc and any one given DRM format typically only tends to be supported by a non-complete set of devices. DRM doesn't prevent anyone who wants to pirate the recordings for free from doing so. Just ask the guys who spent years and millions of dollars coming up with the DRM for HD and Blue-ray disks, which was then cracked in a matter of days, by hobbyist programmers on the internet, doing it for kicks.

[shibole]

Yea, DRM is basically "we want people to be able to play it, just not copy it" which is equivalent to saying " we want machines to be able to read it, just not read it". Even if you manage to implement this using smartcards, all it takes is for one person to yank the smartcard out of an "approved" hardware device and connect it to a computer or "tap into" the decrypted data stream in a device, which could require as little as a JTAG or I2C interface and a computer, and mostly what you manage to do is prevent anyone without such a smartcard-embedded device from using your DRM protected file. So eventually you ditch the smartcard and just give out the keys so that software players on computers will work, then someone gets the key out of a software player and gives it to everyone. Pretty soon everyone is copying DVDs.

My favorite example of insanely stupid DRM is Sony's minidisk player. Sony's player would let you digitally copy CD's to a minidisk over a USB cable (with some "DRM" stuff to stop you from doing it more than once), but it wouldn't let you transfer things that you recorded to your minidisk player via YOUR OWN MICROPHONE or other analog audio source to your computer via the USB, because you might record a CD via ANALOG with your minidisk player then copy it to you computer. Utterly moronic seeing as how you could do that with your sound card and no minidisk player, or (guess what?) just rip the CD digitally. This makes the minidisk player close to useless since it's only real strength is as a small high-quality recording device.

Anyway, audio CD's have no DRM. I think they'll get lots of complaints if they don't have a plain audio CD version, and as long as they have that it's even more pointless to put DRM on any other digital version they come out with.

[ipsi()]

I'm going with the NO DRM crowd. It's a bloody stupid idea that only harms legitimate users, and does nothing to the people who it's actually aimed at. One day, the big companies will actually realise this. Add to this that I don't think you could make a single DRM'd file that would work with every MP3 player out there. The cheaper ones probably have no support for DRM at all.

Also, I'd never, ever buy anything on Tape. CDs are ok, but I don't actually own any equipment that'll play tapes, nor anything that'll enable me to copy them to my computer.

Also, please, *please* record digitally, and don't just convert straight from the tapes.

I like the idea of eBooks for Chinese Learning. Given that Pleco is going to come with a document reader it should be possible to produce ebooks that work with Pleco, which would be utterly fantastic. I'd almost certainly buy that, provided it was a series that actually went somewhere.

[imron]

Also, I'd never, ever buy anything on Tape. CDs are ok, but I don't actually own any equipment that'll play tapes, nor anything that'll enable me to copy them to my computer.

The last time I bought something with tapes, I also bought a portable-tape player to play them and a wire to transfer to my computer. It took ages to do, because recording happens at normal playback speed.

[ipsi()]

Yeah, but I suspect I would find that more hassle than it's worth...

[imron]

Yes, it was indeed a hassle.

[roddy]

I've done that. It's not that bad, you just start it running, get on with something else, and then turn the tape over when it finishes. Quality is only as good as the tape and your tape player though, and sometimes that can be pretty bad. No substitute for quality digital recordings in the first place.