Re: Wizards of the Coast pdf policy

Baird Stafford <baird@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <slrngie9r2.51g.keith.davies@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Keith Davies <keith.davies@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Would honest people buy the $3 version instead of the actual *book*? In
most cases, probably not. I know a *few* people who'd do that, because
they use 'e-book readers'... which are still silly-expensive, so these
devices haven't seen a lot of market share yet.

And some of us carry our laptops to the game as well as the books we
think we'll need. I take the party notes when I'm playing and believe
me, it's a hell of a lot easier on a laptop, which at least has keys big
enough that my fingers don't press two or three at the same time when
I'm in a hurry (which is mostly, since nobody slows the dialogue for the
note taker) than it is on a legal pad. Quicker, too.

My fellow players like the party notes: when a campaign is finished,
they have a complete copy of the novel they wrote.

I've also found it useful, on occasion, to have either a .pdf or
.webarchive of the one book I didn't think I'd need but suddenly do.

And when I'm the DM, the laptop makes a *lot* less clutter. I keep keys
to my maps on it, for instance, rather than printing 'em out - ink for
the ink jet being as expensive as it is, nowadays, and the result being
legible all the time instead of only sometimes like the old dot-matrix
printers were.

I like having electronic copies too. I wasn't asking if people would
buy the $3 PDFs *in addition to* the hardcopy, but if they would buy
them *instead of* the hardcopy.

I suspect your typical RPGer is the type to prefer hardcopy, actual
*books*, to PDF for reading purposes. There's certainly a use for PDFs,
but I think it's primarily as reference rather than reading. I know I
don't much care for reading a lot online; if I've got a lot of reading
to do I very much prefer well-printed hardcopy. So much easier on the
eyes.


Keith
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