I don't remember seeing it anywhere on the forums, and at least me don't check very often what's happening on ShadowRN mailing list. And my guess is that what Bull had say may interest some people here.

Pdfs in the future? Now that's great. Time to get old adventures. Seriously, adventure pdfs for some companies are through the roof. Online buying is also through the roof, which really tweaks off your FLGS.

Don

When's GenCon? and how much do pdfs like that typically cost?

.. I think that's all my questions for now.

Gencon is August 19-22 this year.

Pricing on any eBooks has yet to be determined, as it still depends on contracts being hammered out between FanPro and WizKids, and still may not happen.

Ooh, *warms up shiny new credit card* You and me gonna go spread some looove baby. Thoughts of Brainscan and Bug City leave me tingling...

mmm, pdf's.

Add me in to the drooling mass of fan boys. I can finally start getting them all onto a laptop,and stop hauling three 55 gallon tupper ware tubs of books in my trunk with me to play....

Me, I'm looking at picking up modules and stuff I might have missed, like Lone Star, Queen Euphoria, and UB, PoaD, Super Tuesday, etc.

Don

PDFs would rock my world.

Here's hoping Shadows of Asia also includes Pacific islands such as Hawaii. Any idea what SotA 2064 is going to be? Just an update of 2063, or a whole slew of new information?

Also hoping Running Wild replaces the Critters book, as it's a pain to try and find that thing.

I also hope that if it does, we get the pictures added back in.

Hawai'i? I'd much rather prefer they missed that and concentrated on Asia/SE Asia and places like the Chinese warlord states. Since Hawai'i already got a- smallish- book and they're talking possible .pdf releases, much rather they not cover old ground. But that's just me.

Except from what I heard, the Hawaii book was more like an adventure with a little (real world) history thrown in. Not much to help out for SR.

Regardless, Hawai'i is not Asia... As it is, Asia will likely be missing sections... Sadly, namely Western Asia. Chances are SoA will focus heavily on Oriental Asia, according to Rob.

As I said in the Hawai'i sourcebook thread, if Hawai'i gets any sort of update, it'll be in a Target Book, if at all. Not really a huge amount of interest in it as it stands...

And yeah, I apparentoly forgot to crosspost this info, so thanks for reposting.

Bull

Heh, we dragged all my Shadowrun books out back last night for a game.. I don;t have any of the redundant SR1/2 books, and I sold or gave away most of the place books and the like. So with the exception of the critters books, Sprawl Sites, Shadowbeat, and a few modules, the rest is every 3rd ed book so far

It's a stack about 3 feet high and weighs about 30 pounds

Bull

yes pdf's are a must.

Gah! Call me a supermarket hunter/sportsman. I shoot my meat straight off the meat counter into my cart. Same for my veggies.

Oh I am so looking forwards to ShadowdOf Asia and State of the fucking art 2064

I think he was referring to having a friend with a scanner scan books you already own into PDFs to be used by you. While I'm not sure if even that is perfectly legal, I don't think there's anything really wrong with it -- you own the books already.

His post in the waiting-for-SoE-thread was much more out of line. [Edit]Oops, it was Can't get Magic in the Shadows, not about SoE. Still not exactly malicious, but probably against board regulations anyway. Not that I've never broken those...[/Edit]

NOooooooooooooooo.

I was just cautioning him because people tend to get their panties in a bind whenever the subject is broached.

I think FanPro has an exlcusive arangement with White Wolf to distribute through drivethrurpg. So that'd mean DRM.

I don't give a damn about DRM. I just want those classic books as PDFs.

Honestly, the DRM is a non-issue for my uses. I don't print PDFs (or only print a dozen or so pages that I need), rarely copy from them, and love the searchability. I'd love to see Shadowrun on DTRPG.

Sadly, DRM is an issue for me. So I cannot buy them.

only changed my posts crimsondude2.0 after the board tried sending spyware my way ......blocked it thankfully but thought it would be for the best if I changed my posts.

my sincerest apologies then.

Okay so what's DRM, what's bad about it/them and why would that affect the buying of pdfs?

DRM, as implemented by DriveThruRPG.com, requires you to be using Acrobat Reader 6. When you first buy a file, you need to go online and create an account with Adobe [You can either use a general purpose adobe.com account, or link it to a Microsoft Passport account]. If you backup your files or wish to transfer them to another computer, you'll also need to go online and activate that computer with your account; this process takes a couple of minutes. Once a computer is activated, it does not need to be activated again [unless you reinstall your OS.]

There is a limit of 6 computers that can be activated to your account at any one time, but you can phone a 1-800 number at Adobe and deactivate machines.

DTRPG has a FAQ and further documentation on these matters.

Ah, thanks for that Adam. Sounds a bit like Steam for Counter-Strike actually. A bit annoying (in my personal opinion), but I suppose it's useful to prevent straight forward piracy.

Anyway by the sound of what they say in thos FAQs the pdf books typically sell for 50% of the retail price, if more than 6 months old. I guess I can live with that. You can even print them out and have it all to hand if you like. Useful for all those out of print books.

Er can books be transferred to a pocket PC device? If not, then there's no point to me buying this as I own the books, and this just dramatically limits how I can use them versus paperback copies, with the exception of keyword searches and then only if I'm sitting in front of a PC.

Heck, will these even let me copy and paste text for forum threads instead of having to retype what I'm reading manually?

EDIT: the FAQ says I can copy and paste text, and print book sections. so that's not so bad, still kind of iffy on the Pocket PC copy, but we'll see.

EDIT EDIT: Nifty! they do offer it for Pocket PC. Expect me to buy a freaking WAD of these books. Woohoo!. This will get a goodly amount of business from me!

EDIT EDIT EDIT: Jesus H tapdancing Christ. it's an 8 meg installer for Pocket PC. That's OBSCENE. I'm still going to use it though.

From what the FAQ says it sounds like you can copy and paste a certain amout of text each day (10 pages I think).

It'd be useful for me as I don't own a lot of the older books, and I don't really fancy spending a great deal of my time looking for them on eBay etc. But all these restrictions could be mildly off putting to say the least.

Another question.. I'm not saying I'm planning to do this, but couldn't someone just download the pdf, print it out, and then scan it back in again using OCR? Then they'd have a text document with the contents of the book in it and could copy and paste, transfer, upload, sell, do what they like with it. Seems like kinda an easy way round things. If you don't mind using up a couple of hundred pages of paper and some of your spare time that is...


EDIT: Eh, started typing before all your edits there but it looks like you've answered all your own questions now. Is there actually any need for the rest of us to be on this forum, or should we just leave you to it?

If the price is reasonable i'll be picking up all core rulebooks and non-adventure suplements.

According to someone at the PEGinc forums, there's a way around that restriction if you reuse a pdf writer and send the DRM file through that. Personally, I'd rather get it from RPGnow.com, mostly because I can have a copy on the computer and burn to cd what I want.

Don

That's a good point… unless the DRM is rather sophisticated or excessively restricting, I can think of a trivial way around it.

Does DTRPG do any sort of watermarking or similar?

~J

For all the hassles of DRM, it is embarrassingly easy to get around it. But I don't want to feel like I am doing something wrong by circumventing the protections so I can do with the document what I wish.