Pleco 3.0

[艾墨本]

@Mike, I wish Pleco had a "Buy all the dictionaries now and forever" package deal, especially if the cost of it took into account what dictionaries I've already bought or the amount of money I've already paid to Pleco. 

 

Have you all ever considered this?

 

At this point I have most of them and have found that having lots of definitions side by side paints a really detailed picture of a word. But when you release an "upgrade" to a dictionary, while I'd love to get it, it's gotten hard to justify even more money when I've already spent so much. [Edit to complete the thought] But if I could just pay one large lump sum and know that was the last time I'd pay it, that'd be easy to justify. 

[Shelley]

I wasn't aware that you had to pay for "upgrades" . I haven't paid for anything since my initial payment and some add ons I have purchased and i have had lots of upgrades/updates.

 

Are upgrades different from updates?

[艾墨本]

Yes, Shelley. Sometimes they will update the dictionary. Maybe it's to correct some smaller errors. Other times they "update" the dictionary. I'm not to clear on what makes the update necessitate another $10 payment.

[mikelove]

Sorry for the confusion - you're referring to the Tuttle dictionary, right? That's not an update, that's a totally different dictionary; two, actually, the Tuttle Chinese-English Dictionary and the Tuttle English-Chinese Dictionary. The Tuttle dictionary you previously purchased was the Tuttle Learner's Chinese-English Dictionary; the other Tuttle C-E title is a superset of that, went from about 4,000 entries to about 14,000 but those original 4,000 entries are pretty much the same. Since they share some content we thought it would be nice to let people get the new titles at a discount, and our license with Tuttle for the new dictionaries made that possible, but it's not an update, it's a different dictionary that happens to share some content with one you purchased before.

 

We would have liked to have done the same with Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary -> Oxford Chinese Dictionary, but that unfortunately wasn't possible. (they actually don't overlap anyway - POCD was based on an old 商务印书馆 dictionary while OCD was based on 新世纪汉英大词典 from 外研社) We are considering doing something like this for 现代汉语大词典 to 汉语大词典, the latter again being a superset of the former, but since in that case we launched the larger title first we don't yet have enough people who own only the 现代汉语大词典 for that to be worth offering. If somebody develops an expanded edition of one of the other dictionaries we offer (maybe 外研社 gets into the historical dictionary game and turns 现代汉语规范词典 into 汉语规范词典) we'd probably consider the same approach there too.

 

We normally don't charge for updates to the same dictionary, in fact to date I don't believe we ever have. Most of our licenses with publishers include a clause that gives us (and our users) those updates for free; 规范 buyers have gone from 第一版 to the latest 第三版 without ever paying an upgrade fee. ABC hasn't done a new print edition recently, but they've been steadily updating their internal databases (not only with corrections but actually with quite a lot of new entries) and we regularly release updates with those; at this point we've probably gone through the equivalent of two or three new editions of ABC's, also all free upgrades.

 

That being said, our #1 goal in this regard is getting the best content we can for our users, so if in the future a new edition of a dictionary did require an upgrade fee and we felt it improved enough to be worth paying, we wouldn't be unwilling to do that on general principle; we'd just prefer not to. (and frankly, new editions of Chinese dictionaries rarely change very much) We would make sure to keep the old edition available to re-download for people who didn't want to upgrade, though.

 

As far as a "lifetime dictionary subscription," to be honest it just doesn't make financial sense. We don't intend to stop adding new dictionaries anytime soon - my long-term goal is to have every Chinese dictionary worth buying available in Pleco - and many of them come with very high per-copy royalties, so eventually we'd find ourselves having shelled out more money in royalties than you'd paid for that subscription. I suppose we could price it in the four- or five-figure USD range, with the goal being that the interest on the money you'd paid would itself cover a steady stream of new dictionary royalties, but I don't think we'd get a lot of takers on that :-) Once we started offering expensive specialized dictionaries like PDCM and Grand Ricci, it no longer really made sense to treat our dictionary collection as a complete package that significant #s of people might feasibly want to buy all of. (though a few customers have done so and we love them dearly for it)

[Shelley]

Thanks for clearing that up Mike.

[艾墨本]

Thank you, Mike.

 

Understanding what is going on for the Pleco Business side makes it quite easy to continue dishing out dough for you all. 

 

You've all just continuously provided great support for me whenever I need it and every dictionary is so professionally done.