PDF price, Fairly self explanitory. Options

[Ranneko]

Just out of curiousity, any chance we can find out how much the PDF will set us back?

I mean I know I will be getting it pretty much regardless, but it would still be handy info to have.

[The Canterbury T...]

Since the book itself will be $34.99, I'm guessing the PDF will be around the $23-27 mark.

[Jrayjoker]

Swordfish Mustardball

[Cheops]

That's outrageous that they'd charge that much for a PDF.

[blakkie]

Because?

[ShadowGhost]

Here we go again with the "Why so fragging much for a PDF?" thread again.

The PDF is NOT simply take your pre-press file and hit a button to export a PDF.

Making the PDF is a shitload of work.

You need to make all the little bookmarks/hyperlinks by hand, in Acrobat (your best bet, not in inDesign itself). Then you need to hand test all those hundreds of hyperlinks, from the Table of Contents, through to the Index, to pages in the middle that have links to "See table on page 354."

Sell the PDF for too little, and all the stores that would normally by the hardcover book won't because they're being undercut. They don't buy the books.... Fanpro doesn't make much money.

The distributors of the PDF still need to make a profit margin. Adam needs to be paid for all the hard work he does creating the PDF, proof reading, double checking it. Fanpro needs to make money from the PDFs.

If you don't like the price of a PDF.... don't buy it.

[tisoz]

Looks like the pdf of new releases is running about 70-75% of the print price. So I'll guess $25.

Concerning the price, you are getting the same information, just another format that is cheaper to produce. The savings from the print version is probably in lieu of printing and transportation costs.

[Eldritch]

Not in the industry myself - but based on many comments from freelancers, writers, and artists - they don't get paid a whole lot. I'm guessing that the majority of the cost of a book is in the physical printing.

Yeah, setting up a pdf is time consuming, but what? 40 hours work? Even at $10/hour thats only $400 - a one time fee - not needed for each copy sold like a print copy would.


*Shrug* I guess I'm in the camp of "PDF's should be much cheaper", but what it really comes down to is demand and value. If you feel that the PDF is too expensive, then the only way you can 'voice' this is to not buy it - and encourage others to not buy it. Then hope they lower the price.

But based on the rabid appetites of the fans here at DS, I have a feeling that SR4 PDF will leap to the top of DTRPG's best selling list.

[Velocity]

[Gildashard]

I've always though PDF books were priced high. Look at the break down.

You have two choices, eBook, or Book. Somwhere in that price is the cost of the intellectual property, in this case, Shadowrun itself. Marketing and advertising the product problably takes a cut as well. Proofreading & editing.This applies to both.

So what's left. Well a book has to be made from physical material, manufactured, printed, handled, & shipped. An eBook has to be PDFed with links, bookmarks and tested to see that they work. Both can be bought online, and onlines stores sometimes take a hit on books by giving free or reduced shipping to compete with brick and mortar stores.

Just don't see how a PDF is only little less costly than a REAL book when you factor in what it takes to make the book and get it to the store. I had an old RPG with the pages falling Hardbound one time. It was about the page count and size as Shadowrun. It costs $30 and that was 10 years ago. Granted, that was one book, not a production run, but still.

Now on to my next pet peeve. If I bought the book, why do I have to pay extra for the pdf? I already bought the intellectual property, I should only have to pay the pdf creation fee. Of course this applies to Cassette tapes and CDs as well, if I bought the tape, I should only have to pay an upgrade fee to get the higher quality CD. After all, I already owned the rights to the songs on the album.

Fuzzy line here, and with online music and books, something has to shake out in the end.

[Eldritch]

[ShadowGhost]

Buying the book is just that. Buying the book.

Just because I have a copy of Adobe CS for Mac doesn't mean I get a free one for the PC too. You have to buy both.

PDF is a separate, and different medium. You want both. Buy both. PDFs also have large advantages... being searchable, printable, etc.

If they make the PDF really cheap, then brick and mortar stores will not want to carry the hard copy books.... they're being undercut by the PDF.

This is the same reason why many books cost the same, whether you order directly from the publisher, or buy a copy in a brick and mortar store. That's why FanPro sold the books at GenCon for the same price as what you'd pay in store.

The PDFs are also updated, and get errata updates, corrections etc... for 'free'. You don't get that with the hard copy. Unless you want to pay less for the initial PDF, and pay for each update, errata fix. When I say for 'free', they're building the cost into the initial PDF you purchase.

You don't get a CD for half price just because you own the cassette. Point of fact, you may 'own' the cd or cassette.... but you do not own the songs on the. You just have a license to listen to them.

[Bandwidthoracle]

Since Fanpro is nice enough to give us the errata does that mean we'll be alloud to download a new copy every time the errata is updated (I thought there was a hard limit on how many downloads you got of the PDF)

[Spookymonster]

[Knarfy]

DOuble post, srry

[Knarfy]

Ill tell you why PDF's are as expensive as they are, because they will only actually sell a few compared to the number of books they will sell.

Why?

Piracy, thats why. They will sell a few, and then the file will be up for grabs. If they could guarantee that everyone who wanted one would actually pay for it, then I bet they would make it cheaper. But the less the think they'll sell, the higher they have to charge per unit to make up their baseline.

It kinda sucks, but, welcome to the information age :S

[ShadowGhost]

Providing people manage to remove the watermarks; your name you purchased the book under, from every single page of the PDF.....

Otherwise you're advertising that you're breaking all sorts of copyright violations.

[Knarfy]

I know they have anti-piracy measures, but even so, they will at least only sell one for most groups. Since if you give your friends a copy of your PDF, they arent gonnna rat you out.

But, irregardless, they will sell them for what they sell them :)

[blakkie]

[Velocity]

[ShadowGhost]

I got my PDFs from DriveThruRPG.... every single page has my full name, and order number on it.

Would make it very easy to track me down if they started showing up on the internet.

[Sabosect]

The official PDFs are for sale on a couple of the sites that sell Shadowrun books. Not anywhere near all of them.

As for who puts up the illegal copies: You need to research it yourself. But, while I don't do it, I find it ironic that a game in which canon characters have illegally distributed information is having problems with illegal distribution of information. Looks to me like some people play the game a little too much.

Personally, I don't know anyone who has done it. But it doesn't surprise me that it exists.

[Knarfy]

Hmm, perhaps I should backtrack a bit here. I am not an expert on PDF's or software piracy. I do not regularly hunt down PDF's and download them. (in fact, I have a habit of getting all my books in hardcopy)

It just seems to me, that it being in a digital media format, that the chances that it will be illegally distributed are high, and it is a possible reason for the seemingly high pricepoint.

My original post should have been more of the "this is what it might be" rather than the "this is what it is" tone. ;)

[Velocity]

Fairplay; maybe it is done. All I'm saying is that I've spent many hours looking through various file-sharing netwroks (both peer-to-peer and torrents) and I've never seen a single "official" PDF. I've downloaded dozens (literally) of books and not one of them was "official" (i.e. clean, searchable, indexed, etcetera).

I'm not arguing that it's not done, I'm just saying that I've never seen it.

[Darkness]

Just FYI
http://p205.ezboard.com/fedenstudiosdiscus...picID=363.topic
I came to this board through the DriveThruRpg Forum.