Typophile

Business logic of selling old version of fonts

Michael Byrnes

I'm a bit curious if there is a business logic to a designer selling older versions of their fonts rather than their newest version. Of particular note is Canada Type. Today, as an example, Fonts.com updated the Canada Type library, but a substantial number of the typefaces being sold are older versions, such as Trump Gothic and Dutch Mediaeval, which now is version 2, with 886 characters, but on Fonts.com, youworkforthem.com, and fontbros.com, what is being sold is version 1 with 600 characters. Fonts.com & youworkforthem character info tables:
http://www.fonts.com/font/canada-type/dutch-mediaeval/regular
https://www.youworkforthem.com/font/T0198/dutch-mediaeval

I've actually emailed Canada Type, and their excuse was that it was the distributors fault. But 3 different distributors selling the same old fonts just doesn't make a great deal of sense to me.

I'm not trying to pick on Canada Type, they certainly are not the only foundries to sell older versions of their fonts (FontBureau and Elsner+Flake also sell older versions of their fonts via distributors such as fonts.com, etc.)

Is there some business logic for this?

John Savard

In the case you cite, there isn't any logic to it, but the explanation that it's an accident makes sense.

Certainly companies selling software sometimes give away older versions of the program for free because the features are no longer competitive, and it will get people interested in getting the current version.

With fonts, it is seldom that there would be a comparable value increase in a newer version, but it's certainly possible that the difference between the old version and the new version might be the same as that between a 'basic' version and a 'pro' version, and the pricing could reflect that.

Typography.Guru

I can’t speak for other foundries, but as a general answer: if you have a lot of fonts and sell them through a lot of channels, updates take a reeeeeally long time. There are usually no automated processes for that. It’s all arranged manually with each reseller. That takes time. And if you push out your 2.0 release and customers downloading it find a new bug, you need to start all over again for the 2.0.1 release. So it isn’t surprising that foundries either postpone the reseller updates, or just don’t do them at all and keep the older versions there which have shown to work without problems.
If you find that you have an older version from a reseller, just email the foundry and they will usually send you the update.

Captured from web.archive.org on 22 Mar 2015. view this capture