Elemental Evil Player's Companion Now Available in Print!

Drivethru is offering a POD version of the Elemental Evil Player's Companion (premium and standard).

While that's awesome all by itself, I'm hoping it means that older titles will become POD as well.

Nice find. $8.00 is way cheaper than OfficeMax was willing to charge ($15) to print the same thing.

I hope too that some of the modules and softcovers become PoD, but I'm not sure about the hardcovers/box sets.

 

[JeffB]

The problem is that links like that violate WoTC copyright and are only a short C&D away from disappearing.

What's cool about this particular product is that it appears to be with the explicit permission of Wizards, meaning that it is entirely legal and we can send our players there without fear that it will get pulled down as soon as somebody at Wizards gets wise to it.

I think the chances of seeing Basic in this format are a little smaller — basic represents a good chunk of the PHB, so selling a low-cost print version of it might be seen as competing with the full-cost version. The PoA players' companion includes some material only available in that PDF, and what is reprinted from the hardback amounts to an appendix. I don't think Wizards is particularly concerned about the small number of fans willing to buy a $50 hardback so they can get 10-20 pages of printed spell descriptions. And a lot of players specifically won't want to buy the adventure hardback, because they want to play it before they read it!

I do not know the legality of that lulu link. Just found it while looking for S&W items during a LuLu sale. If they had the DM book, I probably would have bought a set of them already!

 

[CasvalRemDeikun]

Glad I sprung the $2 and got premium!

Shipping for me was 3.99 USPS, but 12(!) for UPS. Still, uploading the PDF onto Officmax.com and getting it saddle-staple, 80lb paper with a carstock cover would have been $29, so I thought it was a steal.

I have a black-and-white printer-copy in my binder, but this will nice to have at the table.

$14 for a 25 page book? Still, it is cool that This is available. I am going to order mine when I get paid next week. Hope it is pretty good. Definitely going premium.

 

[Jester David]

Glad I sprung the $2 and got premium!

Shipping for me was 3.99 USPS, but 12(!) for UPS. Still, uploading the PDF onto Officmax.com and getting it saddle-staple, 80lb paper with a carstock cover would have been $29, so I thought it was a steal.

I have a black-and-white printer-copy in my binder, but this will nice to have at the table.

That's what shipping prices looked like for me as well.
But the 3-7 weeks shipping time was surprising.

 

[fjw70]

*link removed*

That looks like the one I bought when the basic game was first released. The link was removed right after I made my purchase. It's actually a pretty decent book.

 

[Queer Venger]

For me, it would depend on the quality of the scan. Some of them aren't that great - like you can see the text from the reverse side of the paper in some of the older ones. I wouldn't want a printed copy of something like that. If the scan was good quality, though, then sure ... a cheap POD softcover of some things I've only got in pdf form would be choice.

Being a frequent buyer of drive through PODs (specially the premium color pods) that I will be buying 2 of them. I still can't believe the price. I've paid double that for some premium pods for WOD.

 

[Jester David]

It seems cheap, but it is also a 25-page book.
However, $10 is comparable to what Paizo charges for their Player Companions. So it depends on the quality of the paper, the cover, and the type of binding.

Because of the book I have on sale at DriveThru, I have some account credit. So some of that is going to pay for this book. I'll have to do a review on my blog when I receive the book. In 3-7 weeks.
Early June. Yeesh...

 

[Chimpy]

This is really nice. I hope they offer this option with more pdfs in the future.

 

[aramis erak]

For me, it would depend on the quality of the scan. Some of them aren't that great - like you can see the text from the reverse side of the paper in some of the older ones. I wouldn't want a printed copy of something like that. If the scan was good quality, though, then sure ... a cheap POD softcover of some things I've only got in pdf form would be choice.

The new stuff isn't going to be scans. It's going to be the same PDFs as they posted, but probably with higher graphics quality. It's only the older stuff (pretty much only the TSR stuff) that wasn't in electronic format already. And a lot of later TSR stuff was already in electronic formats in the early 90's, but may be in software that Wizards no longer has. (Most of 2E was written on computer, and the electronic version was in RTF files. Judging from the embedded font definitions, on a system using WordPerfect Office.) The question being, "can we still run that old program, and then print to PDF?"

Remastering the old stuff isn't a viable option - there's too much and it's too labor intensive. Rescanning and OCRing might be...

Yes, I hacked into the files from my Core Rules 2.0 CD... Both the DMG and PHB show the same list of fonts, several unique to WordPerfect.

 

[Dausuul]

The new stuff isn't going to be scans. It's going to be the same PDFs as they posted, but probably with higher graphics quality. It's only the older stuff (pretty much only the TSR stuff) that wasn't in electronic format already. And a lot of later TSR stuff was already in electronic formats in the early 90's, but may be in software that Wizards no longer has. (Most of 2E was written on computer, and the electronic version was in RTF files. Judging from the embedded font definitions, on a system using WordPerfect Office.) The question being, "can we still run that old program, and then print to PDF?"

The other question being, "Do we still have those files?"

 

[halfling rogue]

It would be great if they could do this for the Basic Rules. But that would mean they have to finish updating them first (DM stuff)... I've asked directly about it and I've seen others ask about it, but for whatever reason they are really avoiding it. Not sure if that means there's something they're still working on or they're just letting it slide...