4 replies to this topic

[neilio]

I am not against Evan and Rainmaker making a living from their products, but it seems to be a bit of a gouge to charge $10 for a dictionary that is basically the same as the U.S., but with some minor spelling changes. I can understand if this was a new dictionary for a language other than English (i.e. Chinese, Japanese, Urdu), but considering that the British English dictionary was free with Spell Catcher, I'm really disappointed.

Factoring in the conversion, the price of the Canadian dictionary is nearly $15 Canadian, which is nearly a third of what I paid for Spell Catcher in the first place.
Is there any way that this fee could be re-evaluated?

[Evan Gross]

neilio, on Apr 14 2004, 08:26 PM, said:

I am not against Evan and Rainmaker making a living from their products, but it seems to be a bit of a gouge to charge $10 for a dictionary that is basically the same as the U.S., but with some minor spelling changes. I can understand if this was a new dictionary for a language other than English (i.e. Chinese, Japanese, Urdu), but considering that the British English dictionary was free with Spell Catcher, I'm really disappointed.

Factoring in the conversion, the price of the Canadian dictionary is nearly $15 Canadian, which is nearly a third of what I paid for Spell Catcher in the first place.
Is there any way that this fee could be re-evaluated?

Actually, the Canadian English database is very different from the US ones. It was created by the Oxford University Press folks (from the What's New document):

This is a very up-to-date reference, created by The Oxford University Press, Canada in 1999-2000. The Oxford folks have done a really great job with this spelling database. Words like loonie and toonie, lots of Canadian names and places, the correct (according to their extensive research) forms of the various words that we spell differently than our U.S. English and British English friends.

More information is available at the Oxford University Press Canada web site: http://www.oup.com/c...f/dictionaries/.

Canadian English Main Spellings
Word Count: 144,788
Copyright © Oxford University Press Canada 1999
Copyright © 2000 Proximity Technology Inc.
All Rights Reserved

So our supplier has to pay out royalties for Canadian English to a company other than the ones that did US or British, so they can't negotiate any sort of "combination" deal, either.

Like we mention in a few places, once we implement a different license code scheme we will be able to separate the app and languages somewhat better and change the pricing structure.

And it's really just impossible to sell a product online via credit card for under $10. Once the credit card company, the online store folks, and our supplier (Proximity) take their percentage, and whatever other administration charges are applied, there's virtually only about $2 left.

So if we reduced the price to the absolute minimum where everyone but us got something, the price would still likely be around $8.

The contract for the basic 9 languages was negotiated almost 7 years ago. We paid even more up front for them. But that's been paid off, and our contract says we can include them in the product. Not so (yet, maybe at some point) for the new ones.

Like I said in another posting, we paid a lot up front for these 4 extra languages. We have to sell literally a couple thousand (which will never happen) at $10 to cover this advance.

Our hands are more or less tied for the time being.

And at least one of our competitors charge $35 for lower quality databases (look at the other posts for info on who that is).

It's not a gouge - that's the last thing we're trying to do. Can we not make $2 on these things?

(And I wish the exchange rate was 1.5 again. Best I've seen in a while is around 1.31).

[neilio]

Thanks for the lengthy reply, and for clarifying things. As I opened with, I'm totally not against you making a living from this, and I guess if British and Canadian English were both separate, paid updates, I wouldn't have been so snarky.

I hope you can understand my disappointment, though; seeing the cost of British English being included in the license fee, but Canadian English being a separate, extra cost doesn't exactly make me as a Canadian feel welcome. Don't get me wrong; I appreciate that there even is a Canadian-specific dictionary in the first place, but the extra cost does make me feel like we're not as important as British English to be included in the license fee.

At any rate, I am considering purchasing the dictionary. Again, thanks for the reply.

[neilio]

... though now that I've looked at the whois for the domain, I've noticed that you're actually Canadian, so my complaints seem even more petty. Let's forget I even mentioned anything, shall we?

[Evan Gross]

neilio, on Apr 17 2004, 12:10 AM, said:

Thanks for the lengthy reply, and for clarifying things. As I opened with, I'm totally not against you making a living from this, and I guess if British and Canadian English were both separate, paid updates, I wouldn't have been so snarky.

I hope you can understand my disappointment, though; seeing the cost of British English being included in the license fee, but Canadian English being a separate, extra cost doesn't exactly make me as a Canadian feel welcome. Don't get me wrong; I appreciate that there even is a Canadian-specific dictionary in the first place, but the extra cost does make me feel like we're not as important as British English to be included in the license fee.

At any rate, I am considering purchasing the dictionary. Again, thanks for the reply.

It's not about importance or anything remotely like that!

It's all about contracts, advances, and the business surrounding these new languages, along with the whole transition from C&G. It's all related, and will hopefully be modified in the future to make what you want (all languages on equal footing) possible.

But folks wanted these new languages sooner rather than later, and that's what we did (rather than spend time and money on lawyers trying to completely re-vamp our contract with Proximity).

They actually gave us a pretty good deal on these languages, but even so it wasn't a trivial amount of $$$ up-front to obtain them.

If you want to wait until we can implement a new licensing scheme (planned for 10.2, still a ways off) where we can license the languages separately from the program (making it possible to change the pricing structure), you're free to do so.

You can probably read between the lines and figure out the idea we're considering (something perhaps like the Spellex folks do, but definitely less expensive!), but I can't make any promises or announcements at this early stage. A change like this involves many different things, but feel free to give us your ideas and feedback!