Holy sheepdip - wotc to republish old editions

[Dark Mistress]

Interested in this in what and how they do it.

 

[nedjer]

If those electronic products are presented in a relatively inexpensive format, on something that works pretty much as well as a book, and handles much like a book, it would seem kind of wasteful not to simply transfer the stuff.

 

[howandwhy99]

The blog report consisted of this: "republishing old editions. cant say anything yet but there are plans."

That's very nonspecific. My guess is they will re-release pre-2008 PDFs for sale via online stores.

I strongly doubt this will be hardback book reprints sitting next to 4E books on FLGS shelves.

But, you know. I'm willing to be wrong for this one.

 

[Mournblade94]

They need to not do "Hollywood Records reissues" though; back in the early 90s when Hollywood Records secured the QUEEN back-catalog and started re-releasing it they clogged up the CDs with 12" remix this and special guest artist version that. Granted, I can press SKIP TRACK but that still bugs me.

On the other hand, if they do do that, but tell us up-front, and the "extra stuff" (e.g., "here's Nosnra for 4e") is in removable form, e.g., a "conversion booklet" that I can set aside, that's fine.

I just don't wanna buy a copy of say, I2 TOMB OF THE LIZARD KING and find out that it's twice as thick and the map is "reimagined" for 4ENCOUNTERS! or any garbage like that - as long as they say so up front if they're going to do that...

[/QUOTE]

Yes if they publish older additions with 4e addendums I am out. I even stopped buying Kobold quarterly because I cant use the pages dedicated to 4e.

If you want to sell me stuff I want that is fine. If you are trying to sneak in the 4e game I don't want, I will continue to spend my gaming dollars elsewhere, and use ebay to find the old books.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I know that blog entry is hard going -- for some reason, he never went back and even ran it through a spellcheck, to say nothing of a more comprehensive clean-up -- but they appear to have given more details:

james wyatt said that they had offered a year access to ten eberron third edition books for ten bucks. bart carroll remided him that that was for next year and it hadnt been announced yet.

The older material will probably just be rented through DDI.

 

[Dice4Hire]

That blurb isn't much more information than the Tweet from a couple weeks ago. Republish may just mean getting the old books back out in digital format somehow. I doubt many trees will be dying for this. Not that any of that is a bad thing.

I agree 100%. I cannot see books being released, maybe maybe the main core book, but I think we are looking at pdfs.

 

[Arkhandus]

I would honestly be quite interested in buying some old D&D materials from WotC if they republished them......never really got to try anything older than 2E AD&D, and didn't get to pick up much of 2E before it went out of print. So there's definitely some books (or boxed sets? hopefully?) that I'd love to pick up if they went back into print. And print is far better than PDF/electronic versions IMHO.

 

[Plane Sailing]

The linked page did also say about producing electronic formats for kindle, nook & sony - linking up to an established ebook standard seems more likely than PDF at the moment, and I'd imagine that would be the case for reprints as well as new stuff.

However, something to bear in mind is that producing electronic versions (or ANY versions) of publications which were pre-digital age printing is going to be hard, expensive work for them...

 

[Sonny]

I agree 100%. I cannot see books being released, maybe maybe the main core book, but I think we are looking at pdfs.

They've also recently stated they've been looking at print on Demand. In fact, this news would be a pretty big flop if they were just going to push out nothing but PDFs again.

So I'm willing to bet Print on demand, PDF(or other electronic formats) and compatible online gaming apps will most likely be the combo they use for supporting older editions this time around.

Print On Demand allows them to offer printed books, without worrying about the size of print runs or confusing new customers with multiple editions of D&D on the store shelves and the online tools gives them a way to offer a subscription based products to retro gaming customers.

 

[DaveMage]

I'd be interested in the D&D Gazetteers as some of them are insanely expensive on the secondary market.

However, one of the issues in the scanned pdfs from before was that the quality tended to vary from product to product.

Hopefully there will be some quality control, otherwise it's not worth it (unless, say, they are 99 cents/pdf).