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The table top vs. technology - Wizards of the Coast and PDFs
eMouse
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At least two RPG PDF retailing web sites have or are in the process of shutting down their sales of PDFs by Wizards of the Coast publications at the request of WotC.
A WotC spokesman was quoted in their forums and by ICV2 as saying
Might I suggest etching 1s and 0s into stone tablets?
A WotC spokesman was quoted in their forums and by ICV2 as saying
Unfortunately, due to recent findings of illegal copying and online distribution (piracy) of our products, Wizards of the Coast has decided to cease the sale of online PDFs.
We are exploring other options for digital distribution of our content
Might I suggest etching 1s and 0s into stone tablets?
eMouse on
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Though I have to wonder, between their character generator and PDF sales, are their physical book sales hurting?
Fixed
Of course, the pirates will have to resort to scans, but for all I know they already did that.
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What do you mean by that? The PDFs are totally related to the piracy process. The PDFs in question are most likely the professional master copies of the print publications that include search capability (due to the text being a part of the PDF and not just an image). So honestly? It is everyone's loss. Now pirated books will just be crappy scans, unless someone goes to a lot of trouble, runs OCR on them and corrects it by hand.
tl;dr apparently they don't want my money twice.
And you don't even need a PDF, really. The entire PHB is online, minus character creation rules.
I haven't even opened my D&D books in years, but this was a pretty big peeve for me too back in the day. Eventually I just memorized the page numbers for the stuff I looked up frequently.
Edit: Ctrl+V the email:
The ICV2 article which is really easy to find on their front page...
http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/14693.html
The big forum thread about it on WotC's forum, which is a bit harder to find...
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1172698
Uhm, all of them, as implied by the 'ceased the sale of online PDFs' statement.
Then of course there are the PDF-only products, things that are 8-16 pages that would make no sense to print properly, but releasing them as PDF just works. Oh, and things like Battlerun: Best Ever, which I've been looking for an excuse to post to this forum for a few days now, as it is the greatest April Fool's Joke I've ever seen in gaming terms.
So... yeah. Not selling PDFs is shooting themselves in the foot. I'd love to see the sales data they based this decision on. Next thing you know they'll make 4.5 require everyone to purchase their own PHB or something.
(Hell, if anything the switch to using power cards is probably hurting book sales more than anything else... Well, that and the FUCKING PRICE! Jeez.)
Wow, nice of them to give you a whole morning to download things that you've bought.
that's pretty much what they've always done and it worked well enough.
Yeah. The pages are cut out of the book, and they are fed into a page scanner. The first guy usually just shares the unmodified scan. Then the second person in the chain gets it and adds bookmarks by chapter. Usually there are a couple of other guys in the chain that go in and add the rest of the details later. 0 day scans are almost always done this way in my experience. I usually don't see the official pdfs in circulation.
I think WotC has done a lot of good in the past couple years, but when it comes to digital distribution they've always had their heads up their asses.
Someone mentioned that there are IRC D&D groups? Wow.
That's prolly the Paizo could have done. It seems like WotC just came out of the shadows to tell everyone, "No."
More likely is that this order came from Hasbro which wants to improve WOTC's profitability no matter what.
Since WotC also altered some policies related to fair use and what have you, the srd cannot and will not ever cover 4th ed or probably anything after it.