Mandarin Companion graded readers now available in traditional characters (繁體字)

[Rufus]

Due to popular demand, we've just released two of our graded readers in traditional characters. We appreciate the encouragement and support so many of you have offered!

 

While we are working on the remaining three, these two Level 1 books are ready now:

The Secret Garden 《秘密花園》: Amazon, iBooks, Kobo

Sherlock Holmes and the Red-Headed League 《卷髮公司的案子》: Amazon, Kobo

Our 3 other books are still in progress and should be available this June: 六十年的夢，猴爪，盲人國.

We are also working on print editions of the book AND we are selecting titles for our Level 2 readers. Post any questions or comments and I'll be sure to reply. Thanks!

[Koxinga]

Good news, I might buy one. But why does it cost $5 more than simplified?

[Rufus]

I'm not sure what you might be referring to. The simplified and traditional versions are all priced the same. I just double checked on your account  . If you find something different, let me know where you're finding it. 

[Koxinga]

The prices on iBooks and kobo seem to be the same for both simplified and traditional. On Amazon.com, it's $9.94 for simplified and $14.94 for traditional. It's like that for both books.

[Rufus]

That is extremely strange. I just checked the publishers interface and the different country pages and I didn't find any instances of the traditional versions being $14.95. I don't not believe you because this wouldn't be the first time we've had Amazon mess up the pricing (once there was a pricing problem that it took them 4 weeks to fix). What country are you viewing the Amazon pages from? We can probably take this offline and I'll do my best to help. Thanks!

[Koxinga]

I just tried going through proxies from different European countries and I saw prices $8.94, $12.94 and $14.94. US and Australian proxies showed $9.95.

[Hofmann]

American here. Traditional versions seem to be $0.01 more.

[Rufus]

That's Amazon for you! I've found that, despite the price we the publishers set, they charge different prices in different countries to account for "taxes" or whatever else they feel like. Rest assured, that we don't see any amount of this seemingly random price hike. Unfortunately these days for publishers, Amazon is a necessary evil otherwise we wouldn't have hardly anything to do with them. iBooks and Kobo are much better to deal with but have a smaller reach. 

 

That's my publishing rant for you! 

[Ruben von Zwack]

While we're at it - here's my customer rant: when I told Kobo that the table of contents in one of the Mandarin Companions would only display empty little boxes instead of Characters (but the rest of the book was fine), they sent me an email that their Chinese viewer isn't really good, and deleted the book from my computer. Without asking or prior notice or anything 

I wasn't even complaining or asking for a refund, I just thought, let's be a helpful customer and give them feedback about their viewer.

[Rufus]

Wow! That's pretty much the most un-cool act of customer service ever. Which book was it? I'll have a look on my end and see if there is anything in our ebook coding that could have caused that. 

[Ruben von Zwack]

The Secret Garden. But it's not your doing at all, it's the "Inhalt" ("Contents") that is affected, so the fault is within their reading application I guess (from my rudimentary understanding of how these things work).

They answered me "Unfortunately, our Kobo Desktop application does not support the Chinese language at this time."

[Rufus]

...but yet it displays Chinese characters. Amazon feeds their customers the same line despite the fact that the Kindle is sold on Amazon.cn and they have hundreds of thousands of ebooks in Chinese for sale. *facepalm*