One of the advantages being in the app industry is trying out new apps becomes your job. We've tried and used lots of apps along the way since our college years. Most of them are passable. Some of them are great and you can't do without. A remaining few of them are so exciting that you can't sleep for dreaming about it's possibilities.
There's a Chinese ebook reader and platform “Tangcha (唐茶) (opens new window)” we think most of you guys in the western don't know about. It's made by folks in the mainland China and it's great. It's great partly because it acts like a publisher so it focuses on good reading experience, and partly because you've got to have a little bit of faith and courage to jump into digital publishing in a developing country like China.
# Piracy rocks?
There are piracies, and we have to admit that sometimes we quite enjoy them. While we cannot watch our beloved American TV series at our home located in Asia, we turn to pirates or sharing societies naturally. (There's a line we should not cross: people shouldn't make money out of pirating. They should only make enjoyment out of it.) We're not saying this with pride. Actually we're saying this with sadness. Once you know that the world's full of brilliant ideas, tools, and inventions. You just can't stop thinking about experiencing them.
We don't think there exists a way to stop piracy totally. As Steve jobs said (opens new window): “Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.” And the director of Tangcha wrote * Original: 抑制盜版的唯一有效方法， 是把自己的產品做得足夠差。沒有需求就沒有利益，沒有利益就沒有盜版。 : “The only way to stop piracy is to make your products bad enough. No demand, no interest. No interest, no piracy.”
“So, what to do? Go the other direction. Realize piracy is a service problem.” as Paul Tassi wrote in his article You will never kill piracy and piracy will never kill you (opens new window). And he provided an awesome simile: “Piracy is not raiding and plundering Best Buys and FYEs, smashing the windows and running out with the loot. It’s like being placed in a store full of every DVD in existence. There are no employees, no security guards, and when you take a copy of movie, another one materializes in its place, so you’re not actually taking anything. If you were in such a store, you’d only have your base moral convictions to keep you from cloning every movie in sight. And anyone who knows how to get to this store isn’t going to let their conscience stop them, especially when there is no tangible ‘loss’ to even feel bad about.” So there actually exists a way to fight piracy instead of suing pirates: Making things easier than finding ways to the imagined store.
We can actually see this becoming true on iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix. They all gain huge success in profits and in fighting piracy. But there's still one serious problem which relates to a severe social problem.
# hTC is a Taiwanese brand? Really?
As a Taiwanese, hTC once made us proud. Even it's as expensive as an imported iPhone, Taiwanese are still buying it to show patriotism. But when we're alone at night we can't help but ask ourselves: Why can't I have my lovely hTC at the price of $99.99 USD like the Americans? And why does Samsung only cost 80%(even lower) of the price? Paul Tassi also pointed this out clearly. “The primary problem movie studios have to realize is that everything they charge for is massively overpriced. The fact that movie ticket prices keep going up is astonishing. How can they possibly think charging $10-15 per ticket for a new feature is going to increase the amount of people coming to theaters rather than renting the movie later or downloading it online for free?” Since the overpriced problem exists in the U.S., it tends to be even worse in Asia, due to import duty and the differences in income levels. You can't afford the price and you want it so bad, so pirates arise to fill in the gap.
“And here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be…Perhaps not every graphic novel and board game needs $100M or $200M thrown at it in order to become a feature film when there are hundreds of creative, original screenplays that get tossed in the trash. Perhaps you don’t need to spend an additional $100M marketing a movie when everyone is fast-forwarding through commercials and has AdBlock on their browsers.”
No matter if you noticed or not, collectively we're making a tiny tuft of people extremely rich and leaving a great number of people starve. The disparity between the rich and the poor is expanding, because the rich does not know how (governments' faults) or does not want to give back to the society, and also the middle-class just wants to become the rich. The internet changed the rule and begot revolutions. But we still consider the accumulation of massive wealth justifiable and right because of the deep-rooted mindset of capitalism.
# Donation is not the ultimate solution
It (opens new window) says that Bill Gates is the world's biggest donor. But wow you might think, why the world still sucks with over $28 billion donation. The answer, we suppose, is quite simple. Because donation is not the answer.
The poor and the sick need our donation, but what they need more is a system for them to stand up on their own feet (in the financial side it's like what Dr. Yunus (opens new window) did). It is also what the whole world needs: a sustainable system.
“Treat your customers with respect, and they’ll do the same to you. And that is how you fight piracy.” Paul Tassi ended his article with his simple suggestion. Here's our own: “Make your product so great that they'll feel ashamed not to pay. Then give back what you earn so the world can keep moving forward.”
(TReader is our endeavor to promote Chinese e-book based on this ideal. Go check it out!）
Update
TReader is closed, the ideal needs something bigger than us... Tangcha is also barely breathing (Chinese article).
