I am trying to get all my openings into one database, so I want to export the lines from my chessable course to my opening masterbase. But after contacting support I found out you can only export your own courses to prevent piracy. Is there a way around this? I am not going to share this with anyone, this is only going to be for personal use
You can only export your own courses to prevent piracy.
I agree 100% with this policy.
It’s not fair to the people who put in all the work not to get paid.
You say that you will not share this with anyone and I believe you.
But there is always someone who shares. And that is when people lose income.
1 Like
Honestly this is why I prefer to do all my work in Chessbase. Once I’ve done the work, I own the data and can export to pgn, print it in entiretly, etc. You can’t say the same with Chessable, where you’re effectively just long-term renting the course.
1 Like
I disagree about the ownership. You are not renting it. They cannot cancel it. You don’t have to pay again. But your use of it is limited by natural constraints.
1 Like
They can cancel it, though - this has happened on other platforms where you buy a digital product and then it is removed from your library in the middle of the night. And if Chessable ever shuts down, well, then your $250 video course is no longer going to be available in any form.
If they cancel it, it will indeed be refunded. Not very likely though. And have to be full price and after you have hopefully already gotten good use out of it.
The thing about Chessable going under: If the Play Magnus Group goes under, Chessable will be sold. It is worth a lot. So, the chance that you lose your courses are not likely. It is more likely your house gets flooded and your books damaged.
1 Like
It would be nice if eventually technology and legal elements would allow publishers and various platforms come up with a standard/business model, and offer a product that we as consumers can purchase and take to the platform of our choice (without taking physical ownership) and have ability to move it in the event the platform goes down. When we purchase the book its really buying a license to use the product(which is already the case), and then subscription on a platform of choice is a way to consume it. I think this kind of business model would remove the need to worry that your purchase will disappear, or that you will not be able to have everything in one place, and hence result in more purchases, while forcing platforms to compete and offer more features to us.
As an owner of Woodpecker method on Forward Chess(which has an app and allows reading books offline which is great for my metro commute) I wish I could try it out on chesstempo or chessable but it’s not worth a second price of admission.
Then again I am sure many of us bought DVDs of movies we owned on VHS, and now buying them from various cloud providers, without same hesitation we have towards chess content.
There are various concerns.
-
You want access to the product in many formats. Having many formats costs extra. Those who only have it in one format and only want it in one format would have to share the costs of your desires. Not fair. And not something the publishers can do.
-
Part of the financing of the many formats (which all sell less than if there was only one format), is that some people buy the same product twice.
-
Obviously, there is an arms race against those who illegally copy material. What you are suggesting makes it certain that copyright is a thing of the past and all products will be produced in a very cheap way.
-
When we put the Woodpecker on four different formats (print, FC, CA and CT), we have four different business partner constructions. Having something available on all formats through single purchase, would create the most immense accounting challenge I could ever imagine. And everyone would have to trust 100% that no one else were inflating the amount of access a product was achieving. And how do you compare reading one page on Forward Chess to spending 20 hours on chesstempo? It is so undesirable that it does not happen for big companies like Disney, Netflix and so on. Everyone have their own system and present accounts to the content producers. It is the only thing that works.
Out of curiosity to use woodpecker as an example since it is available on many platforms.
I am thinking of the following business model. I go to quality chess and I buy a licence to read woodpecker on one of the supported platforms (this is a fixed cost I pay once). However, to read the book on platform of my choice I would need to pay them a monthly/annual fee, if after a while the platform fails to keep up with other platforms I take it elsewhere and I pay them a monthly fee to consume my purchased license, or if I find the book to be terrible I shelf the licence and stop paying anyone to consume it. In this model even though I paid a fixed price I cannot consume unless I pay the reccuring fee to the platforms. I think of it more like buying an oracle database license and then taking it to AWS or Azure to use.
In current economics, with woodpecker cost around $30 on most platforms, is it possible to set a fixed cost at $10-20 and then charge $1 per month on platforms of our choice(I don’t see why platforms that offer more shouldn’t charge more)? I think in the long term such model could be result it higher reccuring revenue.
1 Like
I know this is how a lot of software is moving, towards taking more money and slowly, because it works. But I cannot see how in a small market like chess literature, something as complex as this would work. We are five people in Quality Chess. Forward Chess are fewer. Chess Tempo are two people.
And on top of this it would be expensive to set up and might just turn people off entirely.
When Magnus group buys out, forces to retire, or bankrupts everyone and set up a monopoly, that is exactly what you will be able to do at $100-150 per title.
2 Likes
Beware what I wish for … Thanks for humoring me!
1 Like
As a user, I wanted the same thing.
And then I saw Blackberry, Sony, Nokia, Ericson, Motorola, and so many other companies which made mobile phones shut down. Now, we are having an oligopoly on phones, and phones are just getting more and more expensive, without a reflection on the quality.
So, yes! Having everything across one platform might be convenient, but you might sacrifice the plurality and the quality.
2 Likes