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."

​

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."

[FONT=&amp]Save[/FONT][FONT=&amp]Save[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Save[/FONT][FONT=&amp]Save[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT]​

 

[Morrus]

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

My issue is, based on what we know, its a bad deal to get your D&D content. I'm having a hard time understanding why people are adamant about spending $30 per book for the functionality $20 per book elsewhere can give you. People are defending their right to be charged more for the same content.

I just think that this app vs. the eventual D&D Beyond app (both slated for "this fall"), when they are compared side-by-side, one side is going to come up lacking. And its a shame. At $20 per book, I'd have invested in it as a "budget-friendly" choice to the more feature rich D&D Beyond or VTT versions. At $30 per book, the value simply isn't there to justify it.

I don’t understand why this is an issue for you. Don’t buy it. It’s an easy fix!

There is no good reason to not sell a book in a new format. Apps are a popular format, whether you want them or not.

Buy the book in whatever format you want. I don’t understand the mentality which makes somebody go online and complain about the existence of the book in formats other than the one they want.

 

[TheSwartz]

I HIGHLY doubt that they'll give this to users who've bought their products (multiple times) free, or deeply discounted... and, yet again, you're paying for a subscription product dependent on that service staying in existence; not owning a PDF that you can keep forever. I dislike pathfinder, but see Paizo for a fair way to do this.

 

[Morrus]

I HIGHLY doubt that they'll give this to users who've bought their products (multiple times) free, or deeply discounted...

Who’s “they”? WotC isn’t making this.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Why did you feel the need to post this?

Could you not live with the thought that had WotC issued electronic rulebooks earlier, they would have had at least one happy customer?

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

Because "I want to give WotC my money but they won't take it" is the dumbest reason in my opinion I always hear about anything WotC does or doesn't do. So when I hear it yet again, I like to point out if giving WotC your money is *really* that important to you, then go ahead and give it to them.

"I want to give them my money" is NEVER a reason why WotC should choose or not choose to do anything. And if that's the best reason you can come up with for why they should do something, then you have an extremely weak argument.

 

[Remathilis]

I don’t understand why this is an issue for you. Don’t buy it. It’s an easy fix!

There is no good reason to not sell a book in a new format. Apps are a popular format, whether you want them or not.

Buy the book in whatever format you want. I don’t understand the mentality which makes somebody go online and complain about the existence of the book in formats other than the one they want.

Because it COULD be a good product! I don't want to see it fail, I really don't. As I said, at a different value I'd be inclined to buy in. But it just seems to be the wrong way to go about making such a product. For me, its not about PDFs or being forced to pay for content again digitally. Those fights are over and done. Its about this product being a bad value as it is currently being reported. Compared to alternatives, its BADLY PRICED product.

So I won't buy it. Fixed. If I feel the urge to buy digital content, I'll support Curse as I feel they're product gives me better value for my money. I have a feeling that I'm not alone in that sentiment.

Believe me, I'm as big a WotC shill as any fanboy, but this product is just... poorly thought out.

 

[Morrus]

Because it COULD be a good product! I don't want to see it fail, I really don't. As I said, at a different value I'd be inclined to buy in. But it just seems to be the wrong way to go about making such a product. For me, its not about PDFs or being forced to pay for content again digitally. Those fights are over and done. Its about this product being a bad value as it is currently being reported. Compared to alternatives, its BADLY PRICED product.

So I won't buy it. Fixed. If I feel the urge to buy digital content, I'll support Curse as I feel they're product gives me better value for my money. I have a feeling that I'm not alone in that sentiment.

Believe me, I'm as big a WotC shill as any fanboy, but this product is just... poorly thought out.

It’s not from WotC. It’s clearly a licensed product. I suspect you’ll see a LOT of licensed products you don’t want over the coming years. That’s OK. Hell, I don’t even know what DDB is!

I get that it’s not worth the price to you. That’s fine.

 

[Mistwell]

I HIGHLY doubt that they'll give this to users who've bought their products (multiple times) free, or deeply discounted... and, yet again, you're paying for a subscription product dependent on that service staying in existence; not owning a PDF that you can keep forever. I dislike pathfinder, but see Paizo for a fair way to do this.

Digital is ephemeral. I don't even understand this idea that PDFs are "forever". I've lost countless PDFs and expect to lose countless more before I die. And for sure my kid won't inherent my PDF "collection". Whatever is left of them at the end of my life will die with me. Only my physical books are likely to last a long time. So what is this "PDFs will last FOREVER!" stuff about? PDFs are only roughly 20 years old as a technology anyway. If I really care about having stuff long term, I buy a hard copy.

By the way I still have some apps I bought using my Palm Treo from 2002. Including reader apps with content. The device continues to fire up and be usable for those apps just fine. I am not even sure the premise that apps are more subject to loss than PDFs is a valid one. You call it a "service" but I am guessing this is as much downloaded content that stays in your app and device indefinitely as much as a PDF would.

 

[fantasmamore]

Digital is ephemeral.

No, it's not. People from all over the world convert old books in digital formats just to address that. Digital is eternal.

I've lost countless PDFs and expect to lose countless more before I die. And for sure my kid won't inherent my PDF "collection".

Use a cloud service or the equivalent of "time machine", an app for macs. I have never lost a document the last ten years. I have lost or destroyed physical books in these years however.

PDFs are only roughly 20 years old as a technology anyway.

PDFs are the standard format for printing (WoTC sent a pdf file to the printer in order to produce the physical book). If there is going to be another format in the future it will most probably be a postscript format similar to pdf and even if it's not, you can convert each pdf you own in a variety of formats. As long as there is printing involved, pdf or similar formats are going to be the industry standard.

By the way I still have some apps I bought using my Palm Treo from 2002. Including reader apps with content. The device continues to fire up[...]

And I still use Windows XP through Parallels in my laptop in order to run old programs. I am not sure that I can do the same with an android app however.
I bought an iphone 3G around 2008 and I kept using it untill 2-3 years ago. Over the last few years I couldn't buy anything from the store (nothing was compatible with the ios3 or whatever version I was running) and when (finally) the device died there was no way for me to find the "peppermint" app that I was using to create colour palettes since it was no longer available in the store. Today (albeit in android) there is no app as easy to use and fast and full of useful features as Peppermint once was. Imagine if peppermint was an app for reading books designed only for this app.

So, digital is forever, but not every digital file can stand the test of time.

Personally I don't care if WotC doesn't publish pdfs, I buy the physical book and the fantasygrounds module and this is more than enough for me. But I do understand why people want pdfs and why they consider it as a superior format. Tomorrow I am going to run Reavers of Harkenwold (4e) through fantasy grounds and imagine from what format I extracted images, maps and text...

 

[Shasarak]

Huge amounts of passion and vitriol vented over a product that hasn't been released, and that we are still unclear as to the functionality.

Man, I love the internet.

Would you prefer some discussion about your product or would you prefer the deafening sound of no one giving a damn?

Personally I found the Dragon + app to be particularly awful to use so I will not be using anything based on that.

 

[guachi]

Fwiw, you can copy the text from any Pathfinder PDF, and any D&D classics PDF as well.

I do this all the time with my D&D classics PDFs. All. The. Time.

I'm running a campaign that's so far used nothing but old modules. Even though I've gone out and bought paper copies of all the modules I've run (except B10. It's really expensive) I still buy the PDFs to hack apart. Very useful.