Pros and cons of PDFs

I'm trying to put together a comprehensive Pros and Cons of the PDF list and would appreciate a bit of help brainstorming the concept (sorry, can't search this forum yet).

I have the most obvious Pro and Con covered--at least to me.


PRO: Free Updates, from a simple update to correct errata to updating to the 3.5 version of the SRD.


CON: Poor quality due to ease of publication, lack of seriousness, lack of willingness to dedicate resources, etc.

I can easily come up with quite a few more. What's your take?

I think the con you have does not apply to all pdfs. I've read pdfs that were better then many books on similiar subjects.

Pros: low overhead cost to generate and distribute (from a publisher's point of view).

Con: desire to print makes initial cost point illusionary.

By the way, what do you mean by a lack of seriousness?

The biggest con is not having a professionally bound book, in front of you, that you can page back and forth through. You lose the feel of the pages, the smell of printers ink and good paper pulp (rather than the steril computer paper you get when you print it out), and the overall feel that this is a lasting thing, a book that will go on public and private library shelves and be paged through by perhaps another generation. In other words...you lose its bookishness, which is a wonderous and powerful thing. How many of us would be playing this game if we were not enamoured with books when we were younger?

You cannot resell a pdf file. You will never dig it out of a dusty bin in a used book store, or admire it at an auction.

It will never be something your nongaming friends see on your shelf and inquire about. It will not be there when you glance over at your gaming material, ready to inspire a new idea, merely because it stands out in your mind as an image of a complete work as opposed to a few electronic words.

You will not take it with you to your gaming sessions, or to browse while in the bathroom, or while on vacation, unless you print it out or carry a laptop.

You will not be able to flip through the pages before you buy it at your local gaming store.

You will not support your local gaming store in buying it, spelling potential doom for the industry as new entry into the hobby becomes more and more difficult from lack of exposure at such stores.

You will make it all that much easier for people to steal it. If you doubt this, ask yourself how many people download mp3s without permission, compared to how many steal it from a music store. And then ask yourself if you have ever known a gamer who would download it, given the opportunity.

If your computer ever crashes, gets infected by a virus, or gets corrupted files, you may very well lose the pdf forever.

There are a few more "cons" to pdf books.

Pros

Copy and paste capability

Storage (CD or hard drive versus physical book shelf)

Print only what need for immediate game. Leads to hauling less stuff.

Search capability.

Generally lower price than print.

Multiple printouts for marking up if you want.

Backup copies.

Cons

Printing can be a pain.

Cost to print in addition to purchase.

Reading in bed, sofa, outside, library, metro.

Black and white printing of color pictures

Tabletop use if you don't use a laptop.

Binding/covers.

Download times for big files when you have poor internet connections.

Reading onscreen can be tedious.

Limited preview capability.

Smaller market.

Pros:

Speaking of their search capability... If you have the full version of Acrobat (expensive, but maybe you have it for your job or something), you can create searchable indicies of your entire PDF library. You can search for anything and the results are practically instantaneous, even across hundreds of PDFs. If you have PDFs for the SRD, this can make a laptop the ultimate instant-referance tool at the table. You can legally have PDF copies of books and suppliments that you own and can add them into the index as well. Pretty sweet.

You don't have to worry about faulty binding.

You can print out copies for your entire group (this might not be legal. I'm not sure.) (edit: now that I think about it, it's probably not legal. Oh well.)


Cons:

Unmodifyable. If you have house rules or errata, you can't change anything.

You don't have a cool looking book to go on your shelf and impress visitors.

Mistwell said:

It will not be there . . . ready to inspire a new idea, merely because it stands out in your mind as an image of a complete work as opposed to a few electronic words.

Click to expand...

I disagree with this one.

I do think of pdfs as complete works that are ready to inspire ideas.

When my friends were thinking of making a medium level dwarven earth cleric and an elven archer I sent them some stuff from Librum Equitis (a pdf prc book) one took some flavor text from a class for character background inspiration and the other took one of the archer classes as the majority of his class focus.

Some may think less of pdfs as merely "a few electronic words" rather than a paper product (a few physical words), but that is not universal.

MerakSpielman said:

[
Cons:

Unmodifyable. If you have house rules or errata, you can't change anything.

Click to expand...

Copy and paste into your own document.

I have a word file of feats from most sourcebooks I own, and it is a lot easier to copy and paste than to transcribe from a book. The end result is one searchable modifiable source for all of them that keeps growing.

Pro: source of endless threads discussing the merits of PDF vs Print

Con: see Pro, above



On a more serious note:

pros:
1) ability to print out and annotate just the parts you need without having to crack open a 300+ page hardback
2) inexpensive

cons:
1) For cover-cover reading, I'd rather have a book. printing out many of the PDFs can be a time consuming and costly exercise.
2) some spotty quality issues, but this is largely mitigated by the reviews here at this site.


Another pro/con: PDFs are electronic, hence, don't take up space on the shelf. They take up space on your disk drive, and are subject to being corrupted by system crashes, flaky hardware, etc....

Voadam said:

I disagree with this one.

I do think of pdfs as complete works that are ready to inspire ideas.

When my friends were thinking of making a medium level dwarven earth cleric and an elven archer I sent them some stuff from Librum Equitis (a pdf prc book) one took some flavor text from a class for character background inspiration and the other took one of the archer classes as the majority of his class focus.

Some may think less of pdfs as merely "a few electronic words" rather than a paper product (a few physical words), but that is not universal.

Click to expand...

My bad, I was not clear enough on this point.

I meant it is not on your shelf, when you scan the shelf looking for inspiration and see the binder edge or cover, or when it falls off the shelf or you take a group of books down and you see the cover, with the image on the cover and the description on the back, as a whole an complete work in front of you (as opposed to accessable, but not all in front of you). With a pdf, unless the title itself is sufficient to inspire you, it won't really have this impact on you.

To get a better impression of this effect, walk into a library and just start looking at the shelves. Something will strike your fancy and you will take a book down...and it might not be the title. Sometimes it's a cover, sometimes the size of the book physically in comparison to other books, sometimes the color, sometimes the authors names, sometimes because it looks well used by other readers, whatever. PDFs rarely have this effect. If a library were just full of computer terminals, you could find the specific book you are looking for, or a list of book titles in a subject, but it wouldn't quite have the same inspirational effect as going through shelves with more than just a title.