TSR pdfs

Yair · May 29, 2004

I seem to recall hearing that the old TSR products are no longer being scanned, and so the current online collection (through rpgnow.com or svgames.com) will not be expanded to include ALL the old products (and that's it is missing in parts).
Is this true?

Crothian · May 29, 2004

Ya, it seems to be that way.

Painfully · May 29, 2004

The pdfs are hardly a blip on the profit radar for WotC. I think if they offered it on CDs, it would be more profitable for them. Just like people go looking for the Dragon Archive CD-ROMs, I think it would be cool to have the entire 1E/2E collection on my shelf as an archive.

Staffan · May 29, 2004

Painfully said:
The pdfs are hardly a blip on the profit radar for WotC. I think if they offered it on CDs, it would be more profitable for them. Just like people go looking for the Dragon Archive CD-ROMs, I think it would be cool to have the entire 1E/2E collection on my shelf as an archive.

Actually, the origin of the whole thing was a similar idea - offering the complete Forgotten Realms collection on CD. However, after they saw the sales of the Dragon archive (and they weren't exactly impressive), they decided to can the idea... but they still had all those books already scanned in, and most of those were donated by fans. So, instead of releasing a CD, they started selling them online, and then expanded from there.

johnsemlak · May 29, 2004

Staffan said:
Actually, the origin of the whole thing was a similar idea - offering the complete Forgotten Realms collection on CD. However, after they saw the sales of the Dragon archive (and they weren't exactly impressive), they decided to can the idea... but they still had all those books already scanned in, and most of those were donated by fans. So, instead of releasing a CD, they started selling them online, and then expanded from there.

Hmm, that explains why many of the FR products are much better scanned than others, I suppose.

Kesh · May 29, 2004

Well, Wizards never put much effort into the project in the first place. It was essentially a one-man-project from the start, and they cut funding entirely last year. So, nothing's going to happen on that front anymore.

DaveStebbins · May 29, 2004

Here's the last I heard on the project.

http://www.bastionpress.com/Archives/esd.htm

Staffan · May 31, 2004

johnsemlak said:
Hmm, that explains why many of the FR products are much better scanned than others, I suppose.

Actually, Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, Al-Qadim, and IIRC Dragonlance products. These were painstakingly OCRed and laid out to match the original books as close as possible (using the same fonts and so on). After they had done these, they decided to use a less time-intensive method - basically, a quick-and-dirty OCR (mostly for use in searches) and then put an image of the scanned page on top.

Compare the size of the PDFs sometime. IIRC, the Revised Dark Sun box is something like 18 megs. The Planescape boxed set, which has about the same amount of material, is more like 60-70. That's because large parts of the DS box is text (which takes up very little space), whereas Planescape is images.

johnsemlak · May 31, 2004

Some time later Jim Butler posted more details, on the Dragonsfoot forum IIRC, that said effectively that the ESD project had stopped and no new ones would be made.

Ah, here's the post

Originally posted at Dragonsfoot.org
Just before I left WotC, I managed to convince the company that they shouldn't cancel it. The costs for scanning in the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, and Dark Sun materials were too high. And the company we were dealing with wouldn't budge on price.

So, when I started Bastion Press I took the scanning with me. WotC had new rules to follow (keep costs down; keep file sizes small; produce no more than 6/week because that's all our online store can process; etc.). As they laid off more and more staff, there was no one who had time to adequately review the materials for errors (and even the readers we hired missed lots of things).

The small file sizes resulted in a number of quality complaints (due to the resolution we had to use to keep file sizes reasonable for WotC). I eventually convinced them to drop the file size requirement, and our later scans were amazingly better. But they didn't want to pay for the older products to be rescanned.

When Wizards sold the online store to another company, they ran into revenue issues internally. While the scanning program eventually paid for itself, it never paid back the scanning costs for the products in the same quarter those costs were incurred. So, WotC cancelled the program because it couldn't pay for itself fast enough.

So, there you have it.

TSR pdfs

Yair

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Crothian

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Painfully

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Staffan

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johnsemlak

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Kesh

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DaveStebbins

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Staffan

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johnsemlak

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