Future Clip Reader Possibilities

Hi there,

There is no doubt that Pleco’s clip reader feature is a fantastic tool for allowing Chinese texts of higher levels become more accessible. It is such a motivating tool for me to get into texts which otherwise would be out of reach. Being able to then dump the unknown characters into the flash card feature is also a great thing indeed.

Do you know if there are any future possibilities of being able to open a kindle ebook within the clip reader?

Many thanks

Christopher
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Kindle books are copy-protected, so I'm afraid there's no way for us to open them in Pleco.
 
I see. That makes sense. The reason I asked was because I’m planning on making a Chinese learning resource (which was my skill/profession in English Teaching before learning Chinese full-time), which I could sell through Amazon. However, my thinking was to do it in a format which could be opened in Clip Reader. I realise I could do it as a pdf, but I’m not very hopeful that such a format wouldn’t just end up being sent onto classmates after it had been purchased - thus killing my potential to earn anything from the resource. I realise this is not so Pleco related, but any suggestions would be much appreciated.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
On Android at least you might be able to find another copy-protected e-book reader app that our Screen Reader function would work with - Kindle doesn't (they block it), but others might. However, it's not technically possible for us to offer that for any e-reader on iOS.

We actually do support copy protection for our own e-book add-ons, but we aren't currently planning to offer that publicly. To be honest, the financials for that sort of thing are a tough sell, with Google/Apple already taking a 30% commission - for us to actually make enough money to cover the considerable cost of creating / supporting this service (legal work on contracts, liability insurance in case somebody's book is stolen, accounting, etc) and supporting creators in preparing their books for it (most of which would likely be of fairly low volume), the royalty we could afford to pay would be quite low, low enough that I don't think very many people would be interested in working with us.

It's pretty easy to offer e-book fingerprinting - put the name of the person who bought it on the title page - to discourage piracy even without copy protection, and you would probably make more money selling a non-copy-protected book directly and keeping 100% of the money (from people who didn't pirate it) than you would selling a DRMed book through us and keeping whatever much smaller % we could offer on that.
 
My Apologies Mike - I thought I had replied to you, at least to say thank you for the time it took you to write the above. Your thoughts were very helpful by the way.
 
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