D&D 5E So why no PDFs? Is their fear of piracy -that- bad?

[seregil]

I don't think they have any special insight. I think they're just wrong. In fact, in the wake of the 4E PDF fiasco, I'd go so far as to call it hubris.

But no biggie...there is no shortage of other PDFs to spend that money on.

THIS.

WOTC's idea of creating yet another format for books is wrong-headed. PDFs work and nothing stops them from having Web content AND PDFs.

The sale of PDFs on DndClassic is a perfect example: every PDF they sell there is found money. Those products are out of print. It costs nothing to make them available (or almost) and every sale is $$$.

However, the argument that newer books are different is valid, IMO. You don't want your PDFs to hurt your books sales.

However, WOTC let's Amazon sell the books at BELOW the cost of FLGSs. THAT is destroying their 'local network' far more than any sale of PDFs could. Why would I pay 50$ at a FLGS for a book I can get for 29$ on Amazon? THAT is an issue they need to address and soon.

WOTC can make money of PDF sales or the pirates will fill the void. Yes, piracy will happen anyway but you might as well make some money off of the demand. WOTC doesn't want to. Ok, it's their company, they are free to do what they want, including getting it wrong. Which they have, IMO.

 

[prosfilaes]

OCR'd images of book pages are slow take up far too much space.

What does OCRed images of book pages have to do with anything? A proper PDF uses the text directly from the original files, and if you know what you're doing, taking the preprint files and producing nonOCRed PDFs should be trivial. OCR should only be used if you don't have the original documents, in which case it's way cheaper then proper OCR.

I think there's a LOT of room to explore different ways to present material in a digital format that would far more useful than just a digital copy of the printed book.

It's called HTML. Those are your two options. Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, things you've never heard of, they all support those two options, and their support is usually good. You could put in millions and you'd still have more frustrated customers then if they just went with one of the two supported options.

 

[Bugleyman]

To those with a good grasp of technology, there are two kinds of companies...those which "get" digital, and those which do not.

Unfortunately, WotC clearly remains one of the latter.

 

[aramis erak]

What does OCRed images of book pages have to do with anything? A proper PDF uses the text directly from the original files, and if you know what you're doing, taking the preprint files and producing nonOCRed PDFs should be trivial. OCR should only be used if you don't have the original documents, in which case it's way cheaper then proper OCR.



It's called HTML. Those are your two options. Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, things you've never heard of, they all support those two options, and their support is usually good. You could put in millions and you'd still have more frustrated customers then if they just went with one of the two supported options.

Actually, there are 3 other widely supported filetypes that have stable presence in the market: RTF, ePub, and raw ASCII text. of these, ASCII isn't suited for large files nor complex ones. ePub isn't good with tables, and tables matter in rules... and RTF lacks DRM of any kind, as well as font-binding into the file. ePub could be made to work. RTF could work, but could look different on different platforms due to different font installs, and that can sometimes break tables. Both ePub and RTF support hyperlinks.

I will note that ePub is a variant xml format based upon html, but it has different tagsets. It lacks decent tables support in ePub 1 and 2. ePub 3 isn't widely supported. an actual ePub file is a zipped folder of XML including the XHTML subset...

I will also note that PDF is a superset of Postscript.

If they don't do PDF, then I would hope they go ePub.

One other widely supported format, but one not suited for D&D rulebooks, is cbz. There are cbz readers for almost all currently sold platforms, except certain very narrowly restricted linux and android implementations.

PDF is probably the best bet. ePub, despite fewer features than full HTML/XHTML, is a better choice than HTML or RTF, specifically because it's widely implemented. It isn't, however, readily printable.

 

[Uchawi]

The game licensing will make or break the game in a more significant way then releasing content in PDF format. The later you can not stop, even if the primary format is hardcopy.

 

[sgtscott658]

Hi-

Is there an email address to WoTC that handles illegal pdf's on sites hosting them?

Scott

 

[Paraxis]

Hi-

Is there an email address to WoTC that handles illegal pdf's on sites hosting them?

Scott

It doesn't change anything, most of the host sites are in countries that don't have or don't care about intellectual property laws.

 

[prosfilaes]

It doesn't change anything, most of the host sites are in countries that don't have or don't care about intellectual property laws.

Don't care about intellectual property. Afghanistan, East Timor, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, San Marino, São Tomé and Príncipe, Seychelles, Somalia, and Turkmenistan is the entire list of countries that haven't signed either the Berne Convention or TRIPS. I don't think any of those make a habit of hosting high-bandwidth websites.

 

[evilbob]

Haven't really read the thread - sorry - but just wanted to quickly say that I am about done with this silly notion of not having books on PDF. It's gotten really frustrating, and there have not been any explicit, in-depth reasons given for why this isn't happening - only that it isn't happening. I thought I'd be fine but I've gotten so used to using PDFs while gaming that not having them is really starting to make playing the game frustrating. It just makes everything take 10x longer, and when you're used to moving quickly it makes 5.0 really, really drag.

People keep saying something about Dungeonscape... Yeah. I'm one of the beta testers and my impression is that it ...leaves a lot to be desired. If that is their PDF replacement they are sorely mistaken.

 

[Paraxis]

Don't care about intellectual property. Afghanistan, East Timor, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, San Marino, São Tomé and Príncipe, Seychelles, Somalia, and Turkmenistan is the entire list of countries that haven't signed either the Berne Convention or TRIPS. I don't think any of those make a habit of hosting high-bandwidth websites.

We are talking about a 30-80MB file, not an entire season of a tv show, you don't need a high-bandwidth site. And if a company requests a take down, another pirate puts up the file in under a couple minutes. All I am saying is you can't stop the pirates so why try, it is like the war on drugs just kinda pointless.