D&D Reader App Coming This Fall? [UPDATED]

Many people have been asking for official D&D PDFs, and WotC has been addressing the need for electronic reference materials at the table in various ways. According to Mashable, WotC is releasing a D&D Reader App this fall. It's not a PDF, but it's basically a D&D-specific Kindle-esque app for iOS and Android. Mashable reports that "Each book is broken up into different sections. So with, say, the Player's Handbook, you can tap on little thumbnails in your library to check out the introduction, a step-by-step guide to character creation, a rundown of races, individual sections for each character class, equipment, and all the other pieces that, together, form the D&D Player's Handbook."

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It's possible they are just referring to D&D Beyond (some of the details below correspond very closely with that), but it may be that a separate D&D Reader is in the pipeline.

UPDATE -- EN World member TDarien asked Adam Rosenburg (the author of the article) whether this was different to D&D Beyond, who replied "Yup. Beyond is more activity-oriented, so it can handle stuff like dice rolls. Reader is basically Kindle, with good, clear chapter divides."

UPDATE 2 -- EN World member kenmarable has spotted that Polygon also has an article about this. It is a separate app called D&D Reader - not D&D Beyond - being made by Dialect, the company which does Dragon+ for WotC. They tried a beta version, although it wasn't complete at the time.

Other items from the report include:

• You can favourite specific pages.
• Some of it is free, and the rparts of books are paywalled. "If, for example, you'll only ever care about rolling a bard, you can just buy that. Prices for individual sections are $3 or $5 (depending on what you buy) and the three full rulebooks — Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master's Guide — are $30 apiece for everything."
• If you buy parts of a book then buy the full thing, the cost is pro-rated.The free sections include "character creation, basic classes, gear, ability scores, combat, spellcasting, and all the other sort of ground-level features that everyone needs to understand in order to play."

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[Satyrn]

What did you plan on doing with a legal PDF on a regular basis that is made impossible in this format?

Also not who you were responding to, but if I understand those who want pdfs, it's not because of the regular functionality they get out of a pdf. The selling point would be the peace of mind the apparent stability of the format provides. It's rather likely they will still be a le to use their pdf 10 years from now.

The stability of these digital offerings is sort of a crapshoot.

 

[rknop]

What did you plan on doing with a legal PDF on a regular basis that is made impossible in this format?

Seriously?

Read them on my Linux machine, to start.

Use the reader I want to use.

Still be able to read them even when the app is no longer supported and doesn't run on newer versions of Android.

Not be stuck in a walled-garden proprietary ecosystem.

 

[Shasarak]

The *oldest* PDFs I have are under 16 years old. Some ancient pirated 3.0 books I found on a burned CD a few months back and threw onto Google Drive (the CD was barely readable and I was unable to recover half the files on it).
It's a *big* file. 29k for <100 pages. And it looks like absolute crap. No hyperlinks, no bookmarks, no OCR. The pages change size every few pages. The text is blurry and the images have the pixelated artifacts of a bad JPEG conversion.

Wait, 29k is a *big* file? So I can only fit 500,000 copies of that pdf on my usb drive then?

 

[Mistwell]

Not who you were responding to, but when I ran Pathfinder I used the PRD

Different topic. That would be PRD vs SRD. Not PDF vs this app.

 

[darjr]

I’m not anathema to this product. In fact I think it’s cool that they are trying to meet some of us halfway.

Another thing a pdf provides is a way for disabled or deaf folks to use tools on them allowing them to hear the pdf or read it in a way that wouldn’t be economically viable for curse or this other company to do. Also as there are great readers out there that let me put in notes and links and highlights that are hot linked. Been looking into using something like it to run AL mods and stop printing them out.

 

[Mistwell]

Seriously?

Read them on my Linux machine, to start.

You should be able to do that. Probably not on day one, but someone will port the app to Linux in all likelihood. Or you should do that!

Use the reader I want to use.

That's not really something you can "do" though. What is it you want to DO with it that cannot be done using this app?

Still be able to read them even when the app is no longer supported and doesn't run on newer versions of Android.

Speculative.

Doesn't sound like there are a whole lot of obvious reasons. One you should be able to do, one seems to have no purpose beyond vague preference (you may like the new platform better), and one is speculative. Is that really what you thought "seriously" would convey things like "use on Linux"?

 

[darjr]

[MENTION=2525]Mistwell[/MENTION] are you really asking these questions?

First, no he can't just port it over. The code is proprietary. IF it was a PDF he could write his very own reader. But not some custom proprietary app. Is Curse going to make their app open source to be ported? I'd wager on never.

Use the reader of his choice? OF COARSE it's something you can DO. How about read it on an epaper reader like a kindle? A kindle will never run this app. But it can read a PDF. Or a braile translator that reads PDF. This app won't do that. I'll bet this app won't even support text to speech.

And as far as being speculative? Weren't you just having issues with a vendor because of old broken software? Software being abandoned and locking up data isn't a new problem and it's not about to go away. A PDF doesn't really have that problem. Their is copious documentation out there about PDF and quite a few open source example reader implementations. A new one could be written post haste if all other readers were abandoned or no longer worked on current hardware. This software from curse and others not only can't make that claim at the moment, they very likely never ever will.

His points are solid and I think your response is a stretch even for you.

It boils down to WotC doesn't release these in PDF because they won't, and that's their prerogative. Despite all the spilled ink, I don't really fault them. It's their stuff. All I can do is keep pointing out why I want PDF and why it's a good idea.

I have a suspicion that they agree with me on many fronts, hence so many different ways to get the data out there that creep up to being ebook or PDF like. I think they'll get there. I hope so anyway.

 

[seebs]

What did you plan on doing with a legal PDF on a regular basis that is made impossible in this format?

View it on any device I own that can display PDFs, which is most of them. Chromebook? Sure. Laptop? Yup. iPad? Yup. Android tablet? Yup. Make annotations which I can save into the file so they become part of the file? Yup. Rotate pages, remove pages I don't use? Yup. Read it forever on any future device even decades from now? Yup.

"A standard format that does not go away when the vendor fails" is a really important feature for me in a gaming document.

 

[seebs]

You should be able to do that. Probably not on day one, but someone will port the app to Linux in all likelihood. Or you should do that!

I cannot believe that you said this, and then dismissed something someone else said as "speculative".

Have you ever ported a non-trivial app from non-Linux to Linux? When it was proprietary and no source code was available?

You haven't.

Anyway, right now, there's no Linux app. That you think there might be one later is irrelevant.

That's not really something you can "do" though. What is it you want to DO with it that cannot be done using this app?

Well, right now? Anything at all. Because the app isn't actually here, it's a future-tense thing. If they'd released a PDF, I'd have the PDF right now and could read it on anything I wanted.

Choice of reader apps may not be a specific task, but consider the gap in performance between a good and a bad PDF reader. I had a crappy PDF reader app. Then I got a good one. Suddenly I could swipe through pages and have every page show up as a high quality render in under a second, instead of waiting five seconds for the rendering to finish. Can I read a book with either app? Sure. Is one of them dramatically better than the other? Yes.

Speculative.

A heck of a lot less speculative than your suggestion that maybe someday there will be a Linux version. What reason do you have to imagine that this particular proprietary app will last forever, or even maybe twenty years? Because I've got PDFs I've had for twenty years, and they still work.

Doesn't sound like there are a whole lot of obvious reasons. One you should be able to do, one seems to have no purpose beyond vague preference (you may like the new platform better), and one is speculative. Is that really what you thought "seriously" would convey things like "use on Linux"?

This is stunningly disingenuous. There is no reason to imagine that it would be possible to "port" the app, since there's no evidence that they're going to release source code. (Hint: People whose entire business model is DRM usually don't.) "Vague" preference? That's a pretty dismissive way to dismiss other people's preferences. Why shouldn't other people's preferences matter? Why do their preferences not matter, just because you consider them "vague"? And how on earth can you call someone else's argument "speculative" when you've just asserted, based on no evidence whatsoever, that there will definitely be a Linux port of a proprietary DRM-based app with a relatively small target audience?

I've seen things like this come and go. How many of them can you think of that were in use 20 years ago and still work today?

 

[ChampionoftheTriad]

You should be able to do that. Probably not on day one, but someone will port the app to Linux in all likelihood. Or you should do that!



That's not really something you can "do" though. What is it you want to DO with it that cannot be done using this app?



Speculative.

Doesn't sound like there are a whole lot of obvious reasons. One you should be able to do, one seems to have no purpose beyond vague preference (you may like the new platform better), and one is speculative. Is that really what you thought "seriously" would convey things like "use on Linux"?

Yes, it is speculative. Based on experience it is probable. I have seen WotC develop the Character Builder that shipped with the 3.0 PH. It was great, it was cool....it never got finished. Then they engaged CodeMonkey to make e-Tools, it was great, it was cool, it got finished, I bought a lot of content for it. WotC yanked the license and -canned the whole deal...without warning. Then, while marketing the launch of 4E, they flouted their NEW digital tools. It would be out when 4E was. It will be great. It will be cool...How'd that turn out? Now, they are developing a new digital too set. And, mid-stream, SURPRISE! we're doing a digital reader app!

This is beside the blindsiding of Paizo, cutting off Dragon and Dungeon magazine. And cutting off pdf sales, not just free ones, SALES. Totally reliable.