WotC Releases Old Dungeons & Dragons Catalog As PDFs 224
jjohn writes "Wizards of the Coasts, holders of the TSR catalog, have released rulebooks and modules for most editions of Dungeons and Dragons through a partnership with DriveThruRPG.com. The web site, dndclassics.com, may be a little overloaded right now. Most module PDFs are $4.99 USD."
The article points out that these are all fresh scans of the old books. It's also worth noting that the decision to make these PDFs available reverses WotC's 2009 decision to stop all PDF sales because of piracy fears. The only reference to this in the article is a quote from the D&D publishing and licensing director: "We don't want them to go to torrent sites. Why not give them a legal route?"
Saving Throw (Score:5, Funny)
Made vs. common sense. It must have been a natural 20.
Re:Saving Throw (Score:4, Funny)
Considering they stopped for several years, I'm more thinking they adopted the strategy from War Games: The only winning move is not to play. Unfortunately for WotC it doesn't work quite as well for AD&D as for global thermonuclear war.
Re:Saving Throw (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people are going to pirate no matter what you do. However, there are a lot who will gladly pay if you give them to opportunity to do so.
Re:Saving Throw (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no. Abandonware is illegal. Flat-out, no questions asked.
Just because you can't get it commercially doesn't mean it's legal to pass around.
Abandonware proponents like to claim this, but it's just something they made up to make themselves feel better.
They get away with passing stuff around as long as no one -cares- or if they're in a country it's difficult to enforce copyright in.
But it's not legal.
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It's not illegal, it's copyright infringement that makes it possible for the copyright owner to sue you for damages. Unless you are doing it on a commercial scale it is not a crime, and the copyright owner may chose not to sue you (as is the case for, say, open source software) so it isn't automatically infringement either.
In the case of abandonware it depends if the copyright owner is around and wants to sue. If not you can copy it all day long with no legal ramifications.
Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
The books are going to be scanned and shared whether they post PDFs or not. The only question is whether there's a legit option for those who want to pay.
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The books are going to be scanned and shared whether they post PDFs or not. The only question is whether there's a legit option for those who want to pay.
yep, i've had scans of all their books and modules for over 10 years, sheesh, almost 20 years. Now when I don't play D&D or AD&D anymore, they make it available legally.
Stupid.
Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
I ended up pirating the entire catalog of D&D products because I couldn't find the AD&D 2nd Edition books for sale in either print or PDF form. So at least in my case, not printing them in the first place lead to piracy. Hopefully more companies get with the program.
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I'm willing to bet shutting down the old editions was more about forcing people into the new than anything else.
Take it from someone who played pen-and-paper in the '70s, you second edition bastardized version sucker.
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I have many AD&D books I am looking to sell. Please PM me if you are interested.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
I ended up pirating the entire catalog of D&D products because I couldn't find the AD&D 2nd Edition books for sale in either print or PDF form. So at least in my case, not printing them in the first place lead to piracy. Hopefully more companies get with the program.
Actually, it was your desire to own something which was not made available which led to piracy in the first place. Justify it how you will, but you are the one to blame for your illegal/illegitimate actions (illegitimate probably being the better word). Just because they didn't sell them, it doesn't mean you HAVE to own them.
Sure, but had they printed them or otherwise made them available he wouldn't have pirated them (assuming he is telling the truth), so it was still them not making it available that lead to his piracy. A thing can have multiple causes, you know, and WotC's stupidity is partly responsible (as, of course, is his desire for them one way or the other).
Luckily, no loss occurred (Score:5, Insightful)
Luckily, since they weren't for sale there was no loss on the part of the content creator. Copyright was set up to ensure remuneration for the work of the creators of intellectual property. By not offering these for sale in any form, I see no moral dilemma in obtaining a copy from an alternate source.
Re:Luckily, no loss occurred (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright was set up to ensure remuneration for the work of the creators of intellectual property.
No, it wasn't. It was set up to encourage creation of content that would "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
The key point is that the "progress" part is what was considered important and desirable, and the "limited times" was key to this, while the "exclusive right" was just a deal with the devil to achieve the greater goal of increasing human knowledge.
Since we no longer have "limited times" as far as an individual is concerned (as the current law is such that a person will be encouraged to add only one thing to the pool of knowledge and then fight to keep making money on it until they and their children die), there is no reason to require people to keep the "exclusive rights" part of the bargain.
Bullshit (Score:2)
No, it was to ensure remuneration. Just because the words of the statute don't mention it explicitly doesn't mean that it was not the driving force. If it weren't for the money, we could just skip the entire debate. Nobody (of statistical significance) expends substantial effort to author a creative work with the sole intent of never showing or distributing it.
Copyright protects the livelihood of the creators of works of knowledge or creativity to ensure that they may do so with the knowledge that they will
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No, copyright doesn't ensure remuneration. Most works have a copyright related economic value of zero. And there are many which are flops that never recover their cost. Remember Green Lantern? Or Pluto Nash?
Copyright at most provides a chance at turning a profit, but it is no guarantee, and in fact, it's fairly unusual that it works out.
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That's true, but his point still stands. If a creator isn't offering their creation for sale, then they aren't contributing to the progress of science or useful arts, and copyright should not apply.
If it had a snowball's chance in hell of being accomplished, I'd be advocating for changing my countries laws such that it only applies to works available within my country: let a work go out of print, or refuse to sell it in one location, and your work becomes free game.
Previously, this would be far too onerous,
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But given that they're not selling them, they don't really have a valid excuse to complain about him downloading them. Ostensibly the copyrights are there to give the authors a chance to earn money, but if they don't want to make use of that arrangement...
Abandonware is a valid concept... (Score:3)
To a certain extent, you're correct.
However, part of the social contract that exists to support Copyright, is the implicit agreement that "We (society) allow you to protect your item, and in return you make more of them so we can use them". Failure to live up to that implicit contract (i.e. sequestering I.P.) on the content provider's end voids the social contract (i.e. consumer's promise to respect Copyright).
I'm not a big fan of many of the justifications for copyright infringement, but in cases of
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What if it's something you, as the artist, decide shouldn't see the light of day? The Disney Vault was created to drive up the cost, not because Disney thinks their films are crap and no one should be exposed to them.
I bet Asimov wrote some stories in high school to which he would have been ashamed to have his name attached.
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Then the author shouldn't publish them. In fact, he should destroy them if he feels so strongly about it. But just because the author doesn't like it is no reason to enable the destruction of a work that has already gotten loose by means of copyright. The world is better off, the more works we have, even if the author is upset.
Virgil wanted the Aneid destroyed, Emily Dickenson wanted her poems destroyed, Kafka wanted all of his works destroyed -- and we are all much better off for having totally ignored the
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That's kind of the conundrum with the tabletop RPG business isn't it, buy once play forever. It's the ultimate open ended gaming experience, an endless vista limited only by your imagination. Great for players, not so great for publishers.
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That's the conundrum of all "IP." You sometimes get occasional exceptions (some old people have bought Sgt Pepper on multiple mediums) but they really are exceptions. How many times have you listened to your favorite album, which you only paid once for? A thousand so far, until later this week when it becomes a thousand and one.
On the bright side, even though people only pay once, you only had to spend the time to create it, once. Don't feel bad for John Lennon if you only paid him once for Sgt Pepper.
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You miss my point - tabletop RPGs are unique in that you don't just listen to the album, you can use them to make your own albums. Forever. It's not 'like' anything else, there is no car analogy here.
And not so much sympathising with publishers, just noting the nature of the beast.
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Which is why WotC should have busted ass on bringing affordable subscription services to their fans instead of pumping out half-assed 4E supplement after supplement that no one bought.
My friends and I waited years for the digital tabletop to be released to DDI, only to watch WotC push it further and further back, only to (apparently) drop the idea forever. After that, we said fuck it, bought a high-end webcam, and now play 3.5E over Skype, using the webcam to share the board when necessary.
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To me, your logic shows its flaw best
That's not logic buddy, it's observation of the facts. Facts which are unique to TTRPGs due to their open ended, player created nature.
If you were looking for reasons beyond the publishers business acumen, it seems pretty inarguable that computer-based adventures stole away quite a bit of the player base. Half-Life was as adventurous as all but a few AD&D games I ever played.
Roleplaying: you were doing it wrong. If you were just rolling dice and maneuvering miniatures around a battlemat, you were wargaming. Roleplaying is a much more visceral and imaginative experience, the best games use neither mat not figures IME. Computer games may have co-opted the name, but they aren't the same thing by a long shot.
Not to say anything bad against computer
Any report on pdf quality? (Score:2)
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"fresh scans" tells me that they're well, scans.. where's the original quark or pagemaker files or whatever was used in pre-press?
reference materials need search, scanned-to-pdf does not allow that without a serious round of ocr first.
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My guess is the originals are either lost or sitting in a box in a storeroom somewhere on ancient backup tapes in some unsupported format and it's easier to just find an old copy of the books and scan them in.
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What's obsolete? These aren't computer games, they're as useful today as when they first came out.
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Ah now a good weekend will have any setting converted to another system, and it takes even less time within the same system. That's if you don't just build on your system yourself, hacking this stuff is one of the great pleasures of TTRPGs for me.
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You know, you don't need the new materials.
There are only two valuable things in tabletop RPG books: the ideas and the mechanics (or fluff and crunch, if you prefer). The ideas can be translated to any system, regardless of the one they were written for, as long as there are some mechanics to back it up. Most of the really useful ideas aren't strongly bound to any mechanics, anyway. Translating mechanics is certainly doable, but is a lot more work to do well.
But you don't need to even do that. You could hav
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I'm hoping that they're doing the OCR work on these. If you're charging $5 for material as old and obsolete as this you had better be putting at least the minimum amount of effort into it.
That is hardly "minimum amount" of effort. That is a great deal of effort. They did that for the 1E books they reprinted, and I know and have talked to the guy that did it. He said it was the hardest thing he has every worked on. OCRs need to be reviewed and practically rewritten again, especially if trying to get the same or similar layout. Stuff from the opposite side bleeds through so all artwork has to be manipulated and have about as much work put into it as the original artist took to draw it (and you
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I have no doubt that it's tiring work, but how many man-hours is that to do? If WotC sells 100,000 copies of the PDF, that's half a million dollars in their pockets (ignoring DTRPG's take, probably 1/3), for paying (just a guess) two guys $30K to work on that PDF for six months.
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Summary says "most editions", I wonder if they'll have the original three softcover books that came in the white box with a couple of dice. That was the set I first learned on. Haven't seen those anywhere since about 1983. I r
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I could do without text searching. After all we don't have it for dead tree editions. What I would like is for these PDFs to have bookmarks.
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Besides, one of the more fun things to do in any offline type of encyclopaedia is to go to a random page and read something, be it in a skill tree, monsters, Encyclopaedia Britannica or Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
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There is not a chance they still have originals.
Re:Any report on pdf quality? (Score:5, Informative)
Quark or Pagemaker files? You do realize that a lot of this dates back to the '70s and '80s, right? I doubt any of it before the late '80s was done with any sort of desktop publishing software. They may have been using professional publishing software, like And, of course, until writable CD drives became reasonably affordable in the mid-90s, they were probably storing any files they were creating on floppies, then later on Zip drives. Chances are good that all the early stuff only existed in dead-tree format before they started scanning it.
At a guess, I'd say that all the original D&D, the first two versions of Basic D&D, and most of the first edition AD&D materials would be in that boat.
I just downloaded the free one they have, though, and the scan is very clean - clean enough that I'm sure they've gone to the trouble of cleaning it up. They've also OCR'ed it at the least, since I can do text searches in it. The module in question is B1, "In Search of the Unknown", with a copyright date of 1981.
Oh... and they are watermarking the PDFs, with the purchaser's name and the order number at the bottom of every page.
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The first 3 books (Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual) weren't originally digitally typeset, but WotC has already gone through the process of doing that for the "1e premium" releases and they're in InDesign, so there should be clean text available without OCR.
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"fresh scans" tells me that they're well, scans.. where's the original quark or pagemaker files or whatever was used in pre-press?
For most of this, there was no pre-press files. They were tape and wax board affairs.
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reference materials need search, scanned-to-pdf does not allow that without a serious round of ocr first.
I have not seen them, but although they are scans, reports on rpg.net is that they are "indexed and searchable".
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Yes, appear to be clean. (Score:3)
Yes, these appear to be clean.
I just downloaded the (free) B1 "In Search of the Unknown" module and it looks great - even has bookmarks.
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You know that troff existed in 1971, right?
Computerized typesetting isn't exactly new.
WoC should make their OWN torrents! (Score:2)
Case in point, their site has crashed due to load.
Provide official torrents instead of trashing torrents in general.
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Where do you put the meter?
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$5 seems high (Score:4, Interesting)
Yale-educated artist and porn star Zak Sabbath's DiY D&D site (with occasional exposed nipples art or links to his girlfriend's tumblr and therefore not safe for work) [slashdot.org] should be required reading for RPG nerds. He's very big on RPG theorycraft, quick rules of thumb and stepping away from canned adventures like those used in many of the prepackaged modules. Having followed his blog for a while, I really see where he's coming from.
It's probably worthwhile to take a look at that stuff, if only to see the historical basis for a lot of role-playing tropes, but any seasoned player can't exactly look at "Tomb of Horrors" with fresh eyes and newbies probably don't want to do the work of converting old stuff to new systems. In the end I suspect that all this stuff is only worthwhile as nostalgia or for historical purposes. Given that, I'm not sure why the price per document is even as high as it is. I understand that this is content that probably shouldn't be free, but I can't see spending $5 on a 32 page PDF that maybe has one or two good ideas to incorporate into a living game.
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Goddammitsomuch. Link fail. Here. [blogspot.com]
and the hot girlfriend's tumblr [tumblr.com], as my penance.
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There is *no* penance great enough for the pun at the top of his blog:
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Zak posts a lot over on therpgsite.com as well, he has a lot of interesting ideas.
Would be stupid not to (Score:3)
The retro clones [wikipedia.org] have taken off (in relative terms, this is a niche product obviously) in the last few years. All the old TSR stuff is available on torrents and file download sites anyway. WotC might as well try and get some of the money.
An interesting challenge (Score:2)
This presents an interesting challenge for the D&D design team. They're working on a new edition of D&D (it's in open playtest [wizards.com] as they develop it).
Now, the new edition will have to compete for sales against D&D's own back catalog. If their upcoming product doesn't appeal to fans of First Edition AD&D, or Second Edition, Third,or Fourth, then people will just buy and play the old stuff. The next edition will have to compare to the classics or it will fail in the marketplace.
This is a victory
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There is no reason to call this person a name, everyone cannot know everything all the time and that mistake is so abysmally small it makes me wonder what is wrong with you that you need to call someone you don't know names like that; well besides the fact that your just trolling.
Seems to me SirGarlon is the one using his brain, he made a reasonable argument with sound logic, and your response was neither helpful or thoughtful
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Is this some vague attempt at a version war, are you just trolling, or do you really not know that there's a 1st Ed. AD&D?
Ah, these books (Score:2)
Scans (Score:3)
FTFA: "The scans are good quality, and best of all, the PDFs are searchable."
I was curious if they had re-set the type for a slimmer PDF. I would expect 320 pages of the Dungeon Master's Guide (even at 1-bit) may be hefty, but maybe not. Certainly more economical for a lost art.
download, schmownload (Score:2)
Though considering I've moved those books about 17 times over the years, maybe a PDF form factor would be slightly more convenient.
Get your binge on (Score:2)
This is the perfect excuse to read up, get your fix, then hop into D&D Online [ddo.com] and get some tabletop action come to life. The client and a decent amount of content is free, and the DM voiceovers rock.
NOTE: This is Dungeons & Dragons Online, not WoW. There be TRAPS in dem dar dungeons, and they can and will kill you very dead!
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DDO is really very different from most other MMOs, and yes, it really does reflect D&D's feel a lot more than the other MMOs do. It's not perfect, but it's got some very nice implementation choices.
Any of the Mystara stuff there? (Score:2)
By that I mean the 83-87 Mentzer revisions of the D&D Basic and Expert sets (and Companion, Master and Immortal sets) or better yet the Rules Cyclopedia, and the Gazetteer series, Wrath of the Immortals, Dawn of the Emperors, Champions of Mystara and Hollow World sets. Had a bunch lost em in a flood.
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Voyage of the Princess Ark, ah them were the days...
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THAC0 (Score:2)
It isn't AD&D if you aren't rolling THAC0. 2nd Ed FTW!
let's see (Score:2)
http://www.dndclassics.com/product/17158/B2-The-Keep-on-the-Borderlands-(Basic)?it=1 [dndclassics.com]
Keep on the Borderlands, module B2. Originally printed 1979 - 34 years ago.
Selling for $4.99 as pdf.
I bought that module at Jolly's Games in Southtown, Bloomington MN in the summer of 1980, for, as I recall, about $5.
Yeah, SURE that's going to work, I'm certain of it.
Private Note to WotC: FUCK YOU YOU REMORSELESSLY GREEDY PIGS.
Seriously? You *first* re-engineer the rules for what, the FIFTH time in 15 years(?), expecting y
Re:Pirates will still run rampant (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if everything you said is true, they could still make more money from paid legal downloads than if they didn't give that option.
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They always have a choice.
Pirating or going without.
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My question is who is getting the money for these PDFs. If the original authors are getting a percentage, great. If it's just going into Hasbro's general revenue, screw them. It's just a last ditch attempt to monetize assets that otherwise have little value to the company, many of which they didn't even produce.
Re:Pirates will still run rampant (Score:5, Insightful)
Because no matter how low the cost, the number of people who will not pay for the product by using torrents will far exceed the number of people who will pay for the product simply because they can.
On the other hand, the number of people who WILL pay is quite a bit larger than the number who would pay for your out-of-print product that's not available electronically, which is zero.
I'm glad that people are starting to wise up that counting the people who do pay is always, always wiser than counting the people who don't; for so long, so very many copyright holders have been no smarter than that Aesop dog that dropped his bone in the lake.
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Because no matter how low the cost, the number of people who will not pay for the product by using torrents will far exceed the number of people who will pay for the product simply because they can.
On the other hand, the number of people who WILL pay is quite a bit larger than the number who would pay for your out-of-print product that's not available electronically, which is zero.
I'm glad that people are starting to wise up that counting the people who do pay is always, always wiser than counting the people who don't; for so long, so very many copyright holders have been no smarter than that Aesop dog that dropped his bone in the lake.
The folks over at gog.com (once called Good Old Games) also proved that people will pay reasonable prices for old stuff. However, not unsurprisingly, when they first started gog.com, it was apparently a struggle to get vendors to agree to sell DRM-free versions of their out-of-print games.
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People are lazy and cheap, which is why if you make it cheap enough they will be to lazy to pirate it.
I don't pirate anything now that netflix and amazon have made it so easy and cheap to get more entertainment than I want. The safest and laziest way to pirate would still be to sign up for netflix and copy dvds and blu-rays.
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Guaranteed, within 15 minutes of the first download you will be able to get this stuff for free
Which was also true 15 minutes before the first download. If you don't want to distribute the eWay, only pirates will distribute the eWay. I'm still waiting for HBO Nordic to get their head out of their ass and deliver something better than SD quality with stereo sound, unless you own a Samsung product in which case you can get HD with surround sound. I'll get my shows where I'm a first class citizen, thank you very much.
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You can already get all this stuff for free. Refusing to offer a legit, paid download has no appreciable positive or negative effect on illegitimate downloads. It does have a direct negative effect on legit, paid downloads.
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You could already get it all for free prior to them doing this, so 15 minutes is just a tad of an overestimate.
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The music industry said the same thing about iTunes. They said no one will ever bother legally paying for digital music when it was freely available to pirate.
iTunes became the number 1 retailer of music. Your argument suddenly seems very flawed.
Right now, these books can already be pirated, but they couldn't be legally purchased before. Putting them up for sale will increase revenue from zero. That's a win for everyone.
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Right now, these books can already be pirated, but they couldn't be legally purchased before. Putting them up for sale will increase revenue from zero. That's a win for everyone.
Well, as long as the profits made from sales are higher than the cost of scanning the books and setting up the store to sell them. In theory the vendor *could* lose if they spend more than they make back. Not that I really think it'll be an issue in this case.
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There are services that will scan books for $1.
Assuming they sell a single copy at $5, then they've turned a profit.
And even if this venture isn't massively profitable, you're better off converting pirates to customers so you can reach out to them for future products. There are benefits to purchasing digital goods legally (no fear of malware/virus, not waiting for someone to seed old RPG PDFs, being able to re-download from the service, etc) that might encourage future sales.
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So, your argument is that getting money from zero percent of the potential market is better than getting money from a small percentage of the potential market?
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It is if 1 person can buy the high quality digital content for $5 and distribute it to the rest of the world and cause significant drop in profits in their published books market. Of course, ultimately that ends up signifying which format most people prefer or at least the delta in cost to benefit ratio.
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How do they steal back normal PDFs?
The format is well documented and surely you have backups.
Re:D&D PDFs? (Score:5, Funny)
The format is well documented and surely you have backups.
He said they were in The Cloud. Why would he need backups?
Re:D&D PDFs? (Score:4, Funny)
In case it rains. Just like paper documents under a real cloud, electronic documents fall apart if it rains in the Cloud.
Re:D&D PDFs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because he cared about having the files in the future?
Trusting a cloud provider to the point where you don't have backups is one of the stupidest things I have heard today.
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So you've never bought a game through Steam?
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Both of which outsource to Amazon.
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Because they're in The Cloud.
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Does this mean all the D&D PDFs I bought before, but which were deleted out of my various paizo and drivethruRPG cloud accounts, are going to be replaced?
Yes. (According to various blogs posted on RPG.net.)
Now, download them and make backups this time.
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I don't think you read what he posted correctly. He was happy when he had them then they stole them from him. It's like me selling you a car then deciding I want the car back. So I go to your house take it from your driveway and keep your money.
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The kindle reader app can handle PDFs, so why not use that?
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He is talking about the app, so that is not the issue here.
E-ink has a lot of short comings and that is one of them. I still don't understand people's love for it, but to each his own I guess. If 10 hours of looking at a monitor does not hurt me, I am not worried about the backlight on a tablet.
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I have a strong preference for Aldiko, among the Android e-reader apps I've tried.
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Umm, if he stole stuff from you, you called the cops, right?
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Really, the Hackmaster stuff is ludicrously high quality and is clearly made as a labor of love by a bunch of people who aren't exactly going to make a fortune for their efforts. I pirated all the out of print gaming stuff too, just for nostalgia's sake. But Hackmaster is a living project and those guys deserve the attention and support.