Most likely.

-paws

Because Encyclopædia Britannica doesn't publish an online subscription service or anything.

Say if a genie snapped it's fingers right now and all the printed books in existence disappeared while every company to release a gaming product converted to a digitally encrypted hacker-proof subscription system. It would depend on the company and what they own for the specific game system. Some would have their whole catalog up while others would only have their own releases for the editions they offer. Perhaps over time companies that have worked on the same system would band together to offer their customers all the material for a system. Those companies that would not go about that model would only give customers the option to require multiple subscriptions to have all the cross material.

Now in the real world we have no such thing to make that happen. That leaves us with stopping production of print, which I do not see happening, for a similar digital model. Books are slowly phasing out but I do not see them ever being truly replaced. Newspapers on the other hand are a completely different thing and most likely it will not be long before those might disappear altogether with how some of them are even shutting down outright.

SpasticTeapot points out that they are "reference materials". They are hobby books plain and simple. Most printed reference material is usually something you pay an extreme price for to actually increase your own personal monetary gains beyond that cost. One of my biggest issues of these "reference materials" is the price point of them. Going over a list for printed hardcover material always confuses me from a quick glance at the price. I do not have the hard numbers behind all the factors so I give the publisher some sort of benefit of a doubt there. Most hardcover releases end up being anywhere from $0.10 to $0.20 per page with the average per page being $0.19. WotC has $0.11 (Player's Handbook) to $0.19 (Martial Power, Arcane Power, Manual of the Planes, FRPG, and Dungeon Delve). Catalyst has $0.10 (4th Rulebook) to $0.20 (Augmentation). Those numbers are all over the place for the various types of books that a company puts out and makes the reasoning for the costs even more befuddling.

Anyway enough of the venting about per page pricing. I enjoy nice artwork and all the fancy layout of most hardcover books like the next person. I wish there was a cheaper stripped down version similar to the Dummy line of books. At the end of the day it is the rules that matter to me as a customer especially in today's crap economy. Less focus on the extra flash for the books would open up more options for publishers in the digital realm. A small subscription fee or perhaps a per release code for web module unlocks added onto the book cost for extra stuff beyond the book like npc databases, adventures, stories, artwork, maps, and so forth would be nice. It would possibly become easier and cheaper for a company to mass produce this extra material to expand the world we play in while keeping people actively on staff. It might even mean that due to the lower timeframe involved, with such things as slaving behind book publishing software/proofreading for a few months to get everything laid out properly for just 1 release, books could be released more often. Since the price would be lower it could even bring more people into the community as they would not be on the fence as to if they want to pay $30 to $40 for one book that sees limited use.

Most reference sites are subscription only. Everything from dictionaries to journals.

I think the scary thing for some of these publishers is that once they get to a point where they offer a stripped-down version of a PDF, they are then going up against anyone else out there that can put out a solid ruleset. They no longer are offering the bound hardcopies that make us think they are "better" or more official. Obviously there is still IP for the setting and the like, but the rules are fair game.

Get someone out there with a better ruleset and it doesn't take long before you trade one PDF for another...

I subscribe to the O'Reilly Safari web site. It's about $400 a year for access to all their and several other publishers' books electronically. I started when it was $325 and they had a bookshelf model (30 slots, books take 1/2, 1, or 2 slots, can't remove a book for 30 days). Since I purchased about $600 in computer books a year, I figured it was a good value and it was. Since I was a consultant, I had access to anything I needed to admin servers and paid extra for 30 slots so I'd have access to programming or more fuzzy texts (like Advanced Unix Programming vs a reference book like PHP Cookbook).

It's going up in price again (about $43 a month) to the point that it's not worth continuing (the model is changing to unlimited access to all books). They've reached the price point where the cost of keeping up on my book collection is about the same as the subscription cost and I'd rather have the dead tree copy. Plus my computer books are still pretty current so it won't be a big hit to the pocketbook to pick up the books I still want.

But I liked it because I could find things a lot quicker than on PDF (much better search engine). What I'd really like is a similar index as in Microsoft help stuff. An index but also the ability to index the entire PDF. It'd make significantly easier and quicker to find stuff. Even on my 2 Gig ram Mac, it's lightning slow to search for things.

Carl

The company I work for has opted for a system that allows us to search pretty much every engineering or inspection standard in existance - not just the current versions but all previous ones as well.

If a game company came out with a similar service, I would use it in a heartbeat.

Yes. It's continually updated. Most books aren't.

Plus it's a 200-year old institution with a staff of 100 and 4,000 regular contributors.

I could see this being plausible for WotC as they're the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, owned by the second largest toymaker in the world. As for everyone else? It's a niche. The only way I could see a Netflix-style market working for everyone would be if every RPG publisher signed on to the project and with your $25/month membership fee you had access to every and any RPG book you wanted. Netflix only works because it's hard to find DVDs they don't carry (other than porn, obviously).

But this is fiction, it's much easier to write than an encyclopedia.

Computer technology is a big equalizer in things like this. My father-in-law is a lawyer. He once told me about the hard days when he first started his private practice how the big law firms could basically bury a small practice in paperwork rather than go to trial because they owned a computer. Back then there were only mainframe systems and only big companies could afford them. So the big company would slam the small practice in court with motion after motion putting its word processing software to devastating and decisive use while the small practice had to respond with typing each counter-motion out manually each time.

Then the game changed. The personal computer became available and the small practice could throw motions almost as fast as the big boys.

Once you remove the need for physical publication the cost of producing the material goes down. Then add the ability to profit from offering supporting material that would rarely if ever make it as published material and you create a situation where the authors of the material can keep busy making weekly additions to the product without requiring the customer to purchase 3+ manuals at $40+ a piece just to play. Makes it easier to sample the game.

Really what I'm suggesting is the 'RPG' will stop being a 'book' and become a combination of electronic core documents coupled with a weekly or bi-monthly electronic magazine that will introduce extra material and the ability to search those archives for the material you need at the moment. This will transform the RPG industry from the 'movie' model, where the authors spend a year producing, publishing and distributing a physical book in hopes that enough people will buy it at $40+ to recoup the costs of production and maybe see a bit of profit, to the 'TV' model, where the authors keep working all year adding little bits to the grand tapestry of the game while profiting from subscriptions for access to their work.

That, or everyone better get used to World of Warcraft.

You can't hear it, but I laughed myself hoarse here.

Perhaps what you mean to say is that fiction is usually less time-consuming to research than an encyclopedia? It sure as shit isn't easier, especially if you want it to be of decent quality, internally consistant, and fun to read as well.

If that's not what you mean, you are just plain mistaken.

No, I mean that making shit up is a hell of alot easier than having to research and footnote the facts.

"The Ratman army conquered the Free City of Dorkiness in the 3rd year of the Reign of Klondas the 2nd."

See how easy that was?

I'm sorry, but that's just impossible.

Everyone knows that the Miragian Ratpeople where brought to near-extinction by Klondas I's ethnic cleansing campaigns. According to Abjorned Tales Volume III page 194, the surviving Ratman population numbered around 7000. Even with Ratman breeding rates, that isn't enough time to build an army capable of handling Dorkiness's million-man-strong legion of Battlewizards.

Quickly glancing at the first post or two I'm just going to say that to be honest, who here actually thinks their not going to rescind this policy within a year?

The great thing about this model? The ability to get fluff retconned! It'll be like the supreme soviet issuing their monthly historybook revisions, except nobody will know it's happening except the people who care enough to make a big stink about it.

Excuse my cynicism, I am actually rather in favour of moving to electronic distribution. I just feel that unwavering optimism takes us places we're best not going.

I don't think they will rescind their policy within a year, or when the fandom forgets about heir being a service retracted. To be honest, all I can think of is "Pride before the fall" and my own personal continuation "too much pride to ask for a hand." Favourite sin of mine - pride.

I didn't mean that everyone would be happy about it, or that the full potential of such an idea will be realized, only that the idea of selling a game by selling a book idea will not persist in a 21st century world.

http://blip.tv/file/1996369

now im wondering how to apply the concept of drm as platform lockin into a SR game. i can actually see rival content corps supplying cracks for their competitions platform, using it as a marketing tool. "see, theirs can be broken! by switching to us, your content is safe, however!"...

hmm, runner teams hitting the company servers developing the latest drm systems, so as to plant a back door developed by a rival corp?

Never expected to see this kind of naive thinkink in a shadowrun forum, monopoly systems like that wuold raise the price trought the roof.
Only reason netflixs is that cheap is the fact that it has to compete with online piracy.

Netflix competes with Blockbuster, brick and mortar video rental and On Demand...I think piracy factors into the cost, but its not a direct competitor.

There are only a handful of true monopolies and only two I can think of off the top of my head: mouse traps and pinball machines.

So, I do agree once distribution costs are cut, then the price drops considerably and the hassle to get pirated copies is not worth just buying the content. The problem with RPGs, is demand. There's just not enough to create the huge volume that makes these price models workable (e.g. Walmart, iTunes).

I'll venture to say that if the price of a hardback RPG book were to be half the cost it is today, you would not see the volume of sales grow significantly. I could be wrong, but I don't see more people getting into table-top gaming just because the books are cheaper. The best a company could hope for would be more existing players buy the book (online or hardcopy) rather than most groups sharing the content. I've been in very few groups that everyone had a ton of books and most with at least half the players having none.

So, the real question would be, is there a price point, online or hardcopy, that would entice those players to actually buy a book. If not, then it really doesn't matter cause you will be selling about the same books regardless of price.

I can answer that, for me at least.

$30 is the most I'll pay for a new hard copy book. I don't know why, but when I see a book above that price, I tend to just automatically put it back on the shelf. The only reason I own the SR4 core books is that I get a rather nice discount at my FLGS and I frequent Half Priced Books religiously.

For regular books in PDF form, I have to admit I'm not a huge fan. The printed layout doesn't really work well for on-screen reading - I just can't sit down with a PDF and absorb the information like I can a book. The main reason to get them is to search for keywords. As a general rule, if I see a PDF priced for much more than half of the printed cost, I won't consider buying it.

Now, I do like the $4-ish price tag on the mini-PDFs like Digital Grimoire. I would like them to be a bit longer - a solid 20 pages of actual content would be very nice. Also, that would put it on par with the magazines I occasionally buy.

-paws

Yeah, having some shorter, low price (~$5 range) mini-PDFs are appealing, but then they'd really need to produce more of those and more frequently. Volume goes up, quality goes down because you are producing more in less time. But it would work.

I guess I am looking at my own gaming table and the GM (in this case, me) has bought 6 books and have PDFs for all of those plus 3 more. I share all of them with my players and I think one or two other people have bought a hardcopy core book. Now even if the PDFs were only a dollar, I have a hard time thinking anyone but me is going to buy it.

I used to not be a fan of PDF books...but I read so much at work on my computer screen, that its not even a second thought reading on-screen. Laptops are cheap, so if I need a more comfy chair to settle down it, that's easily resolved. But, my computer chair is pretty comfy too...

Personally I really dislike PDFs since they're a pain to read though (for me at least) and they're slow to find what you want once you know the book fairly well. As for their usefulness at the table...well they're of no use to players at my games since I don't allow laptops at the table (gamers have a horrid habit of doing everything but paying attention when they have computer access).

As for WoTC stopping sale of PDFs well it sucks for anyone who's bought a e-book from any of the affected companies and even more for anyone who's a fan of an out-of-print game (Alternity, Gama World, AD&D, etc.) since given their prior actions regarding these items I doubt they'd make them available on their site if they do sell them in-house.

When I heard about WotC dropping PDFs I decided to go out and buy PDFs from other companies. That and I use pen and paper RPGs to spark my imagination for what could be done in computer RPGs, with 4th edition D&D it seems like a computer RPG in print, more like a computer RPG design document than an actual game.

I strongly agree with this in theory but in the case of CGL or Crafty Games, which are very small shops, there are only so many editors to go around. But like I said, I strongly agree and it seems to be the system that Crafty Games has set up for Spycraft 2.0. The core rulebook and World on Fire setting book are dead tree, everything else is a $3 mini-PDF supplement (new weapons, new factions, new player classes, etc).

In my land of unicorns and puppies I'd love to see a Shadowrun 10 page mini-PDF released every other month and have it cover... something in the Shadowrun world. It wouldn't have to be much. Say the island of Sri Lanka, a space station, or a few new weapons or vehicles. Or critters or sample NPCs. Or rules for starting a rock band a la Shadowbeat.

An update for the Kingdom of Hawai'i would be choice.

-paws

This would be a very cool product especialy if it had high production values. When tablet PCs become cheap and common the PDF will be all you ever need or want.

I'll disagree with you there, I love the smell and feel of a real book.

Give it another 20 years...paper publishing is dying...

What people are saying and what they're doing are two different things.

I worked in a print shop at a fairly large medical company for years. You heard a lot about how the company was going green, blah blah blah, but man... we printed tons of documents every year. Literally. Most were distributed in our building. (Though a few were sent off-site.) We printed dozens of 500+ page manuals every month.

The print industry might be taking a beating right now, but that's mostly because more people are printing their shit in-house. Why pay a 100%+ markup to a printer when you can lease a high volume color or black and white printer for a fraction of the cost?

-paws

PS I too love the smell of a real book.

I work for a mid-sized, publicly traded technology company. As a money-saving measure I suggested our parent corporation quit publishing physical documents. Now we've gone the route of electronic newsletters and all of our product support documentation is downloaded through our websites and intranet. We do get a handful of customers who ask us to send them a physical document. We suggest they take the PDF to Kinko's. If we didn't do it this way we'd have to print up a new batch of expensive docs every time any upgrade was made (which is weekly).

I love real books too but, in my head, there's a difference between an RPG book (which is a glorified instruction manual with higher production values) and a "book"-book. You won't see me with my copy of Street Magic on my lap, a cup of tea in my hand, a pipe stem in my mouth and mumbling "hmm, I see" to myself. I get in, get what I need and get out. If I had some sort of palm device with all of my manuals and guidebooks in one place that I could carry about with me I'd be a happy camper.

I also hate tea.

With a big 24' widescreen I can read PDFs as well as a book, and they are easier to use when preparing a session - and much more portable.

Good to hear that some companies have the backbone and good sense to commit to this sort of thing.


I know what your problem is, you forgot your smoking jacket and high back chair!



I hate coffee, personally.

-paws

We will see thin tablet PCs for under $400 that have a screen that does digital ink, lcd, and multi-touch. Maybe by the summer but defiantly by next year. They will be based on the NVidia Ion platform and be able to play video at 720p or better. They will also work for gaming and other multimedia applications. You either adapt to the future or you fade away...

In fairness, when I started as Shadowrun Ebook Developer, I wasn't working on developing any other Shadowrun projects. So, there was another "editor" added. That's since changed, so I'm splitting my time between PDFs and print work.

So, currently, there are four Shadowrun PDF exclusives available.

The first was Digital Grimoire, at 18 pages. Almost all of the content was rules.
The second was Bad Moon Rising, at 37 pages. This one's a scenario.
The third was The Rotten Apple: Manhattan, at 30 pages. This is entirely game world information, without game mechanics.
The fourth is SRM3-00: Everyone's your Friend, at 27 pages. This one is a scenario, and it's free.

There are several more projects that are in progress, including monthly Shadowrun Missions scenarios (at $3.95 each), among other things. But, they're all well over the 10 page size that you explicitly mentioned. (Generally, I target 20-40 pages when developing a PDF-exclusive.)

However, this begs the question -- do you think we're not charging enough? At 20 pages and the $3.95 price point, it's about 20 cents per page. I'll be blunt and admit that our margins on these are extremely thin. I'd love to charge more, but I don't think the market will bear it. (I acknowledge that the production costs for a PDF are lower than print projects, but the sales numbers on PDFs are in now way comparable to print releases.)

Would you rather see smaller PDFs at the same price point, or would you rather continue to see 20-ish page products at a higher price? (Note: We won't necessarily be making either change in the short term. I'm just asking for an opinion.)


Consider buying a netbook (c. $250). I have a 8.9" screen netbook that goes everywhere with me. It's got 120GB of storage, which is dramatically more than is required to carry a complete Shadowrun PDF library along with a broad range of reference materials. Adobe Acrobat starts in less than 3 seconds. It takes a couple seconds more to load up a PDF. If I turn the image sideways and go to full screen mode (built in function of Acrobat), I can hold the netbook like a book, and use my right hand on the pageup/pagedown keys to flip through the book. At 1024x600 on a 8.9" screen, I find the gaming books extremely readable. Netbooks are also now available with 10" or 12" screens, typically with the same screen resolution. I find the 12" ones unwieldy for holding like a book, but if I could find a good deal on a 10" screen, I'd give it some serious consideration.

Definitely understood.

I also think there's a serious misconception among many gamers about the creative studios behind RPG products. Many gamers, subconsciously or not, equate RPGs with the TSR/WotC company model which was/is the 800lb. gorilla of the industry. That kind of staff power allows for rapid-fire product release which isn't a realistic expectation for a smaller studio, but the 1980s/'90s mentality of "throw everything at the wall until something sticks" hasn't faded yet. I remember the end of the TSR days when it seemed that a new campaign setting was being released bi-monthly and without a concern for quality, need or desire. Some were hits but most weren't. In fact I think they're still doing this, though the packaging is prettier. I can't imagine how a small studio could flood a market with mediocre product and expect to remain afloat.

This is also true of any business. Volume home builders can crank out a neighborhood-sized vinyl village whereas a spec and custom home builder can only realistically build a handful of homes a year. And you can always see the difference in quality.


I think the formula is little more complicated than determining price by the number of pages. For example, Crafty's PDF-exclusive Spycraft 2.0 releases are all around $4 and they're all around the 5-8 page mark, not including legalese or covers. I think they make up the difference by releasing often and this keeps the players coming back. My opinion would be to release more, shorter PDFs on a regular basis than release fewer, longer ones on a semi-regular basis. For example, Digital Grimoire could have been split into three shorter PDFs for $4 each: perhaps 6 pages of new traditions, 6 pages of new spells, 6 pages on spirit or other rules. Regularly released, very short PDFs would also be an opportunity to break from the metaplot and explore what else is going on in the SR Universe without having to devoting the time to developing a new storyline.

The downside of this model is that CGL would need to be releasing on a very predictable, very regular basis. But it would be like comic book fans who go the shop every Wednesday. If the second Thursday of the month was "New Shadowrun PDF Release Day" I think it would generate serious buzz and also be something unique and trend setting.

20-40 page PDF-exclusives are fine and the prices are definitely reasonable but should be the exception, not the rule for PDF-exclusives. But that's just my opinion and I'm sure there are factors that I'm not aware of.


Now there is something I could put on the wedding registry.

Please keep PDF releases to a minimum. I'm probably in the minority here but they're a pain to read, and a pain at the game table. You either have to pay a second time to print out what you bought (either at a kino's or on your own printer) or use it on a laptop and I've found having laptops (or other computers) at the table a real pain in the but because gamers seem to focus on everything but the game when they have access to their files/internet and it kills the flow of the game.

Another problem I have with them is files are so much easier to lose (delete, corrupt, and so on) then any book I've ever had. I've got game books from 88 that are sill in good shape and see regular use.



Again this is just my opinion and from what I've read I seem to be in the minority, but I thought I'd just throw my thoughts out there.

You (Lordmalachdrim) are probably in the minority on DSF, but I feel pretty sure your thoughts make up the majority of roleplayers in general. Frankly, people in general. Most don't want to curl up to a good PDF...yet many read way more text on screen than they realize. Anyways...

I'd be interested in 10-15 pages worth of exclusive material at the $3.95 price point. Much like Wesley said, 10-15 pages of new spells, traditions, etc for Grimoire would have been well worth it. Adding new vehicles, weapons, gear...I mean, really, PDFs would be a great way to add...I'd probably be less likely to buy fluff, though.

A 30-40 page scenario? I'd say $6.95 would be more than fair. And those that would be interested in those types of PDFs would probably eat that up...

I just want to reiterate that pro-PDF folk are not anti-print. I simply see the PDF as an excellent format to get more material out there more quickly. And even act as a testing ground for popularity. The model I'm thinking of is the monthly comic vs. the trade paperback. The popular stuff gets collected into bound print editions, the stuff that doesn't make the cut in terms of fan recognition... well... it's not disregarded but it isn't collected either. Either way it would be a win-win for everyone.

Here's an idea... Remember those SOTA books for 3rd Edition? What if each chapter had been an individual PDF that was then collected into the final printed book? It's almost more of a magazine or Farmer's Almanac approach where broad topics and ideas are collected into one volume without worrying about a "theme" to tie them together.

i suspect the problem there is the lack of a light, portable reading device that can show a whole page at a time.

most probably have the mental image of reading pdfs (specifically the 2+ column layout used in just about any rpg book) by having to scroll up and down as they cant fit the whole page on screen.

heh, i just did a test with a similar sized pdf on my eeepc 900, and its 8.9" screen was not large enough to handle the pages when rotated sideways, without doing some scaling (making the text close to unreadable).

however i guess a 10-11" screen should be able to handle a SR pdf...

so maybe these forthcoming netbooks with foldable screen (holding a eeepc as it was a book was somewhat troublesome) within that screen size could handle work as a rpg pdf reader...

meh, scratch that, i should have measured one of my physical books. 13-14" would do, if standing on end...

Did you put your PDF reader into full screen mode first? If so, then we have different standards for readability. I find the SR PDFs very readable in doing that on identical hardware.

full screen yes, but that gave me a slight border (using linux software so i guess i could play around a bit).

after that i tried presentation mode to fit the whole page on screen in one go. that gave me a black border at top and bottom and the text was just barely readable.

While I have not always been the biggest fan of landscape layouts, WoTC does the method decently with their pdf versions of Dragon and Dungeon. The issue from March for instance had 5 main articles (19, 11, 10, 8, and 9 pages each) along with 21 pages for the monthly column stuff. The main thing with this is that anything in the pdf is canon material if you want to include it in your game because it is released by WoTC. Shadowrun on the other hand does not have such an option and should not be expected to have something of that scope. While a product such as those two are major pieces of work from WoTC I see no extreme reason that at least 1 mini-pdf a month from Catalyst which covers a specific aspect of the game could not be made available. The Shadowrun, Fourth Edition Compatability list on the website has more than a handful of entries on there that could be reimagined or updated to give players possibly years of one off monthly mini-pdf releases. Fan-made material could be done but at the end of the day it is just that, fan-made material which in most cases goes the way of the dodo even if it is a worthy non-canon edition.

One of my most sore points while I have the website in mind is how it seems to be an afterthought, or perhaps it just falls on the side of being a really bad site overall with little direction in the support department. At times the site seems like nothing more than a product purchasing/convention/chat blog as opposed to a site dedicated to a game worthy of so much more. The whole thing could be set up better to allow for current edition entries on the site directly in edition to monthly pdf releases as suggested above. Nowadays web presence can go a long way in the first impression department or the willingness to actively visit. I find it to be almost a chore to visit the site at all, when I really wish there was a reason to do so even at least monthly.

We're working on it. We're not there yet, but we hope to be.


You realize that's exactly what Digital Grimoire is, right? We do have plans for more material in this same vein, though plans are not the same thing as PDFs ready for release.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but my Netbook runs Windows XP. It sounds like we're describing the same phenomenon -- there's a border at the top and bottom, as the 1024 x 600 pixel ratio of the screen is not the same as the ratio of 8.5 x 11 paper. Personally, I find the materials quite readable at this resolution. It doesn't surprise me to see others disagree with me on that matter.

At the moment, 1 a month, in addition to Shadowrun Missions, is not realistic for us -- there are a whole lot of reasons for that. However, we hope to continue a regular schedule of PDF releases that gradually ramps up.

Does that mean that more staff priority is focused on Eclipse Phase, Leviathans, Paparazzi *shivers* or Ooze the Cook as opposed to the older IP systems?

Any of the following responses will answer the question for me:
None (possibly see also, A truthful response confirming it.)
A vague response. (possibly see also, A truthful response denying it.)
A truthful response denying it. (possibly see also, A vague response, unless it really is the truth.)
A truthful response confirming it. (possibly see here)

No. Actually, it means that the staff is focused on a rather ambitious hard copy Shadowrun release schedule at the moment. I've no involvement in any of CGL's other game lines.

Thanks that is a very welcome response. Now to just sort out a way to fenagle the mysterious top secret release schedule out of you *chuckles*.

From a desktop standpoint, I'm using a 17" screen I bought for $99 to read PDFs. It's rotated 90* so a PDF is very easy to read. I have a 19" HP monitor at work that I have rotated 90* as well. Drives my co-workers and people who stop by nuts. "What's wrong with you... Oh! It's sideways."

Carl

I want a kindle edition of SR4A core rule books.

I agree with Dire. Holy shit would that be useful. Small, compact, easily browsed around, I'd love it.

Heck, gimme that and DnD 4e on Kindle and I'm set for anything. Maybe add a dice roller app and I'm done.