Hello Richard,
This message is very much appreciated and completely understandable. Unfortunately in the free or low cost app world we often forget what it takes to keep them going. Clearly your company is small and hasn’t large amounts of resources to keep basically giving away such a valuable program. Thank you for your straight forward honesty. Karl __________ Karl Smith, Access Technology Consultant Axis 4304 South El Camino St. Taylorsville, Utah 84129 Phone: 801-652-5285 E-mail: k...@axistech.net Alternate E-mail: karl.axist...@gmail.com Twitter http://twitter.com/axistech From: viphone@googlegroups.com <viphone@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Richard Turner Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2024 9:08 AM To: viphone@googlegroups.com Subject: RE: Making everyone pay for voice dream, a blog post from Winston Chen ... This decision to make Reader for macOS a subscription was not an easy one: I agonized over it for the past two years, because I know a lot of people do not like subscriptions. And some of you who are excited about this new app will be disappointed. I get it. So, why go with the subscription model? The short answer is, Voice Dream as a company is not sustainable right now, and subscriptions are the only way for Voice Dream to become sustainable. When I started Voice Dream 10 years ago, I set out to accomplish three goals: 1) do something good for the world; 2) have autonomy and freedom; and 3) earn enough money to live comfortably. With some hard work (and quite a bit of luck), I succeeded. Voice Dream helps people with visual impairments and dyslexia read and has won many awards, so I think my work has made a positive impact; I did not take any outside investment, so I only have to answer to myself; and my total income from Voice Dream is about what I would make if I joined Google or Facebook as a software engineer. By any reasonable standard, it provides my family with a comfortable living. So why change anything? When COVID started, my wife and I finally wrote our wills. And contemplating a premature death made me realize that Voice Dream – in its present form – would not survive for long if I become incapacitated or worse. It would wither away: one day something will break, and then another and another, and at some point it will stop working altogether. Why? Because it’s my personal passion project. I wrote all the code and no one else in the world knows it. I vividly remember an incident several years ago. It was a weekend and I was away from home without my laptop. When I checked email on my phone, there were hundreds of new messages, with new emails coming in every few seconds. PDF files had stopped loading – for everyone. Many students wrote that they had exams or assignments, and without Voice Dream they couldn’t study. I caught the next flight home. Through that abjectly horrifying experience, I learned to never be apart from my laptop. But more importantly, it reinforced for me how much people actually rely on Voice Dream. For many, it’s not just a handy app that makes some things easier but an essential part of life. So in addition to my three initial goals, I gave myself a fourth goal: make sure Voice Dream can operate without me, and survive me. In other words, make Voice Dream sustainable. How do I do that? Voice Dream needs more people in addition to me and Sandra, who does customer support. It needs programmers. It needs a CEO who can manage the overall business and products. It needs marketing. It needs a board of directors. This is the minimum staffing level to make the company operate sustainably. But today, Voice Dream doesn’t generate nearly enough revenue to pay for even a skeletal crew. Why not? It comes down to simple economics. An initial, one-time fee, even $20, is not enough to fund maintenance for a productivity app that users expect to work indefinitely. Software is not like a hammer or a printed book — it functions in a complex and ever-changing environment of hardware, software, and external services. And over the past 10 years, that environment has become more complex and brittle, and it’s changing more frequently. Last year, I spent more than 50% of my time just to maintain the status-quo, without adding new features: dealing with OS and framework changes, new hardware devices, new App Store requirements, fixing newly discovered bugs, and working around bugs outside of my code. $20 is not enough to fund maintenance forever, let alone adding new features. Another problem with the one-time-fee business model is that revenue is unpredictable because it comes entirely from new customers. There are big spikes and troughs. So in addition to being insufficient, the unpredictability makes it very risky to hire people, which is a fixed expense. Then there is the looming issue of what happens if new customers dwindle because the market is saturated. Then how would maintenance be funded? Moreover, the subscription model is actually more fair. Reader for iOS became available in the Apple App Store 10 years ago and sold for $2. Functionally, it did very little. But the people who paid $2 in 2012 now have a powerful and feature-rich app that is best in – an app that is now worth far more than the $2 we originally charged. On the flip-side, someone could buy the app today for $20 and never use it. With subscriptions, only people who use it pay for it, and you can cancel if you don’t want to use it anymore. The number of paying customers is likely to be lower, but revenue will be higher overall and more predictable. That would allow Voice Dream to hire people. With additional programmers, product quality will improve and new features will arrive faster. And, most importantly, it’ll turn Voice Dream from a personal passion project to a proper company with a secure future, even after I’m gone. Ultimately, that’s good for customers. Because the time invested in learning and using Voice Dream apps is more valuable than the subscription fee, and that time could be wasted if the company has no future. My hope is that you understand – even if in a small measure – where I’m coming from. When you subscribe to Reader for macOS, you’ll be paying for a high-quality, feature-rich and sustainable product that will continue to improve. You’ll also be helping to secure a future for Voice Dream as a company. And I and my team will always serve you diligently. By Winston|April 25th, 2022 Richard here, Winston told me essentially the same thing when he decided to sell Voice Dream LLC. to The Applause Group. He realized that the one-time fee model was simply not sustainable, but I cannot find that email, so you will just have to take my word on that. If you still believe The Applause Group is not giving you your money's worth, then good luck with the alternative apps out there. Richard, USA "It's no great honor to be blind, but it's more than a nuisance and less than a disaster. Either you're going to fight like hell when your sight fails or you're going to stand on the sidelines for the rest of your life." -- Dr. Margaret Rockwell Phanstiehl Founder of Audio Description (1932-2009) My web site: <https://www.turner42.com> https://www.turner42.com From: viphone@googlegroups.com <mailto:viphone@googlegroups.com> <viphone@googlegroups.com <mailto:viphone@googlegroups.com> > On Behalf Of regina alvarado Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2024 7:52 AM To: viphone@googlegroups.com <mailto:viphone@googlegroups.com> Subject: Re: Making everyone pay for voice dream I buy books share because I can download a lot of books in a year. This is just a standalone reading tool. It’s wonderful app but it’s just an app. I just think that $59 a year for an app that you just listen to books on is way too much. I will use some other way to read I do plan on contacting Support and thank you for the address. I will tell them that it’s just too bad that I bought it once and now I have to pay that subscription. They sounded so sad that they had to make that decision in the email and yet they made the decision even though it was bought earlier. The changes they made just didn’t add up to much, just my opinion. On Mar 26, 2024, at 10:34 AM, Jody ianuzzi <thunderwalker...@gmail.com> wrote: Hi Carrie, I agree with you completely and I'll send a message as well. I have no intention of paying their fee and I will simply find another book reader. JODY To Boldly Go 🖖🏻 thunderwalker...@gmail.com <mailto:thunderwalker...@gmail.com> "What's within you is stronger than what's in your way." NO BARRIERS Erik Weihenmayer On Mar 26, 2024, at 10:25 AM, Kerry Macdonald <kerryma...@gmail.com <mailto:kerryma...@gmail.com> > wrote: Although I love Voice Dream, I think this is an outrage and simply greed on the developers part. Yes, I know developers need to eat, but I think they are just jumping on this subscription bandwagon that everyone has been doing these days which I feel is a very greedy way to do business. Those of us who purchased it already should not have to purchase it again in my opinion. We need to stand together and make our voices hurt, everyone should send them an email and express their opinion, I have done so, who is with me and will email them? That is the only way to get things done is to make our voices heard. Kerry Sent from my iPhone On Mar 26, 2024, at 12:44 AM, Gerardo Corripio <gera1...@gmail.com <mailto:gera1...@gmail.com> > wrote: Here in Mexico, $60 is almost a thousand Mexican pesos! Yeah I know... you can divide 1000 per month, which would be around 150 or so, but if you've already bought the app once... I know maybe Dolphin Easy Reader might not have the different voices or Audiobook slaying abilities, but it's free. Gera Enviado desde mi iPhone SE (2nd Generation) de Telcel El 25 mar 2024, a la(s) 10:11 p.m., Joshua Hendrickson <louv...@gmail.com <mailto:louv...@gmail.com> > escribió: I can’t believe all this negative talk about not wanting to pay $60 per year for voice dream reader. For me, it is one of the best apps out there for reading both ebooks and audio content. I’ll tell you all some of the recent changes the new owners have done for us all. They have recently allowed audio files in M4a format to properly. When you want to change a reading voice for a bookshare book, you now have a search option quickly find the voice you want. You also don’t have to pay for these voices either. You did have to pay around $5 per voice before. So please stop complaining and pay the $60 per year if you can. If people pay the money, think of how much better the app will be. I’ve pcht a lot of time into putting audio books and audio dramas on voice dream reader with iTunes to not pay the $60 price. When we found out that voice dream reader might be charging a subscripttion fee this shouldn’t be a surprise !o anyone. So please if you can, pay the $60!!! Sent from My totally awesome iPhone!! On Mar 25, 2024, at 10:01 PM, Mary Otten <motte...@gmail.com <mailto:motte...@gmail.com> > wrote: Thanks for the clarification. I never get audiobooks from books share, so book player I don’t care. Kind of sucks. I still think I should be able to download stuff as long as I don’t try to upgrade. You can always do that with everything else. If I have an apple device for instance, and it’s not getting updates anymore I can still use it. This kind of stinks from that aspect. They shouldn’t cut us off from being able to download anything from Bookshare because we don’t want to pay. What if we don’t give a good bloody damn about whatever they think they’re going to implement that we’re going to pay for. I’m not happy about that. But it’s the best thing out there so far. God knows the garbage from speech central doesn’t get it done. It’s too bad. Sent from my iPhone On Mar 25, 2024, at 7:53 PM, William James <wiljame...@gmail.com <mailto:wiljame...@gmail.com> > wrote: BookPlayer is an audio only player. It plays zipped files, MP3, M4A, and M4B. You can get it from the following link. <preview.png> <https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bookplayer/id1138219998> <https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bookplayer/id1138219998> BookPlayer <https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bookplayer/id1138219998> Plays M4B/M4A/MP3 audiobooks Sent from my iPad Air 5 On Mar 25, 2024, at 7:59 PM, Mary Otten <motte...@gmail.com <mailto:motte...@gmail.com> > wrote: I tend to agree with you, Richard. What is book player if you know? I had never heard of bookplayer app. There is no way I’m going to speech Central. It’s just too clunky. If he did what he’s been asked to do and implemented an easy way to download bookshare books right through the app, Then I would possibly reconsider. But I don’t give two figures for all that fancy Voice stuff he’s doing. I’m perfectly happy with what I have now. Mary Sent from my iPhone On Mar 25, 2024, at 4:41 PM, Richard Turner <richardr_tur...@comcast.net <mailto:richardr_tur...@comcast.net> > wrote: I have not updated today. But, if anyone wants to go back and look at what Winston Chen had said when he sold Voice Dream LLC., he made it clear that he would have had to begin charging a subscription to be able to maintain development and he had already started the Mac version as a subscription. $59 a year seems perfectly reasonable to me if you want the app to continue. You can always dump it for DAISY Easy Reader or Speech Central and deal with much harder interfaces and keep it free… Richard, USA "It's no great honor to be blind, but it's more than a nuisance and less than a disaster. Either you're going to fight like hell when your sight fails or you're going to stand on the sidelines for the rest of your life." -- Dr. Margaret Rockwell Phanstiehl Founder of Audio Description (1932-2009) My web site: <https://www.turner42.com> https://www.turner42.com -- The following information is important for all members of the V iPhone list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your V iPhone list moderator is Mark Taylor. Mark can be reached at: mk...@ucla.edu <mailto:mk...@ucla.edu> . 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