D&D 5E Where are the PDFs?

Steel_Wind said:

I must dissent from this view. If a customer is not in possession of that information, I expect that WotC is not in possession of all those "facts" either.

Still, for whatever reason(s), they have decided to not do it. We might fairly observe that:

• Paizo sells .PDFs of their hardcovers for $9.99
• Paizo otherwise bundles PDFs for all subscription products with a subscription; and
• Paizo makes all of their core rules and rules expansions available online via the PRD.

Despite these heretical practices, Paizo seems to be selling a lot of print product -- and PDFs, too.

I think the major differences at play here are:

• Different corporate cultures between WotC and Paizo;
• Different relations with their retailers.

/snip [/I]

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I'd add to this, the point that Paizo is selling a LOT of titles. They have a much, much greater release schedule. Which does mean that you can afford to have titles that don't sell as well - a little bit of profit from a lot of books is the same as a lot of profit from a few books. But, WOTC's release schedule is a fraction of Paizo's, at least for the foreseeable future. Which will make a difference in how they approach sales.

But, really, I think your second point about not pissing off the distributor chain is probably a big thing. At least a much larger consideration than it would be for Paizo.

Hussar said:

I'd add to this, the point that Paizo is selling a LOT of titles. They have a much, much greater release schedule. Which does mean that you can afford to have titles that don't sell as well - a little bit of profit from a lot of books is the same as a lot of profit from a few books. But, WOTC's release schedule is a fraction of Paizo's, at least for the foreseeable future. Which will make a difference in how they approach sales.

But, really, I think your second point about not pissing off the distributor chain is probably a big thing. At least a much larger consideration than it would be for Paizo.

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Well, you are correct about Paizo's product release schedule being (currently) more expansive, but the importance of the PDF to that quite large product mix is critical to their business model. It's a model which depends mainly on the PDF for continued success.

Paizo gets all of this product onto many retailer's shelves. And there is a helluva lot of it every month. But the thing is that the majority of those products ship to retailers in the black. This is possible because Paizo can cover those print costs through direct subscription sales - and usually with a profit, too.

Sure, the Paizo Store's sale price - after calculating in the "Pathfinder advantage" of 30% off Pathfinder AP and 15% off the cover price of everything else is cheaper than buying at your local retailer -- but it isn't cheaper than buying many of their books from Amazon. It's still a little more expensive. So why do people subscribe? Answer: the free .PDF

For Paizo, the free .PDF that comes with subscriptions is the sweetener that even Amazon cannot beat. It's a Paizo exclusive and it works. Never mind the crusty posts about 1990s tech posted here: there are 200 million iPad users out there. And many of those gamers are rolling with Paizo PDFs when they play outside of their homes. (Herolab for Pathfinder on the iPad now, too). Paizo creates a special lite version of each PDF as well as the "full" print version so that they load faster and are easier to navigate on iPads, while still looking pretty.

That sort of marketing product mix is key to Paizo's success because of their business model.

But that model isn't WotC's model, so the risks of PDFs are at LEAST just as great (greater when you view the importance of retailers to WotC's business model) and the rewards far fewer.

Keldryn said:

Honestly, PDF is a terrible format for RPG books.

It was designed in the 90s to facilitate the printing of digitally-created documents. Printing a file off of any computer that it wasn't created on could be a nightmare -- even if you weren't going between Mac and Windows. It's meant to produce the same precise layout no matter where it is viewed or printed.

It's awkward to read a PDF in portrait orientation on a widescreen monitor, especially if it's the standard laptop resolution. Two-column text at that size on anything smaller than a full-size iPad can be difficult to read.

A digital version of an RPG book would be best presented as a fully hyperlinked document that is free of the linear organization imposed by originating as a printed book. Much like the d20 SRD, unsurprisingly. The text and layout would scale properly to look good on anything from a mobile phone to a 24" monitor.

And this takes time to do. I would prefer to wait for a higher-quality product that takes advantage of the digital format. I suspect that this will be coming eventually.

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Yeah, epub or some similar format/approach would work a lot better. Epub is basically html, while the reader you use does the css, in other words, it's easy to change layout/borders/font size/etc depending on device.

I much prefer the PDF as I have no intention of reading on a screen smaller than 13”. RPG books need to be laid out for print as physical books. If they had to go and create a second layout just for electronic distribution, it would increase time and cost. With the number of PDFs out there means there will be PDF readers for quite some time. This gives protection to the investment you put into your digital library. There is much more that the PDF format supports that the publishers just don’t implement.

Oh, I'd absolutely prefer epubs to PDFs, if they were of even tolerable quality. But I don't think that's nearly as likely to get done. PDFs are pretty trivial once you have the ability to make the book in the first place, epub requires a ton of extra work.

That said, I don't really buy the argument that the markets are all that different between Paizo and WoTC. I think Wizards would get very similar benefits from PDFs. I've never subscribed to Paizo's stuff, but I buy all the core books in PDF when they come out. And I would totally buy the 4e books in PDF, if I could. (Yes, I have the "rules compendium", but I would like to have a way to get, say, the PHB and such.) And yes, I'd totally buy the 5e PDFs. And the hardcovers. I like hardcovers for some things, I like PDFs for others.

GURPS 4e went quite a while not selling PDFs, but eventually caved.

fjw70 said:

So let's use the Kindle book as an example. If Amazon stopped supporting them is there a way to convert Kindle books to another format to use outside of a Kindle app?

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The problem with that comparison is that Amazon stopping support for the Kindles is inconcievable. Literally, I can tell myself that 25 or 40 years down the road, support for the Kindle might stop, but short of an apocalypse, I can't imagine why. Certainly not while there are still 20 million Kindles out there with the average owner spending hundreds a year on books.

Compare that to WotC's private system. How long do you think it will be before supporting their private system is not economical? Is it even conceivable that they will still be supporting the system in 25 years? At a certain point, WotC will have an active motive to make them go away, to move us to the next edition. Can I be sure they won't find an excuse to drop support for the old system?

I have to laugh at all this in general.
PDFs "are so yesterday". I'm not sure this even needs an answer, as another poster has stated that there are 200 million iPad owners that read (or might read) PDFs on their devices. I'm one of those people for sure. This Dungeonscape thing could collapse at any time, especially considering the powers that be at WotC might not like how it's selling one day and shut it down themselves. I can see that happening with the way their corporate dept. runs things. This is why I never bothered with Comixology. I'd rather own what I pay for and be able to throw it onto my Galaxy phone or iPad whenever I feel like it. I'm done with print books personally and I would have bought a PDF myself just to see how it turned out.

It's amazing how people here will go to such lengths to defend WotC decision to not release PDFs without even having a financial stake in the company itself. And yet Paizonians have been considered rabid fanboys here through the years. When you think about it, they have more reason to be loyal to Paizo as the company treats their customers/partners right instead of as potential file-sharing thieves.

WotC is deluded if they think piracy won't happen regardless of what they do, they did release print books after all. I'm sure file sharing sites will have them up soon. I won't buy pirated material myself, so I'll just keep skipping D&D altogether. I was looking for a lighter system than 3.5 and this seemed promising but as long as WotC holds the keys, stuff like this will always happen.
Even if I was onboard, I would have to wait till later this fall for Dungeonscape to read the PH that was recently released? Then there's the bug squashing period with their new shiny online software where servers may be down when you need them (if I'm understanding their online model correctly).... meh, I'll pass.

Just..... "wow", as I read some of the responses to the OP.

Kamikaze Midget said:

What.

When the game has an entire site dedicated to selling pdf of every edition of D&D, it is insanely unfair to level an accusation that they are "pretending PDFs don't exist." They are actively selling you PDFs of a big chunk of their catalog!

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Lol, all kind of useless to digital format players without making the core rules available on PDF. If you are a non-print person, laptop or tablet using player/DM, it would suck if you couldn't reference rules as you play.

There seems to be an assumption that if the books appear on dungeonscape that's a reasonable replacement for pdf its not.

Firstly, a pdf can be viewed on just about anything.
dungeonscape would only work on some devices, maybe andorid first, then ios, but not pc etc. And it wouldn't work on old versions of ios i bet.

I have this issue with privateer. I have lots of warmahordes and iron kingdoms books in print, but not electronic. Because that means paying for full price copies on a proprietary app which my ipad1 will not run. IF they had pdfs available i would buy them. Instead there are pirated pdfs knocking about.

If that is there solution it won't work.

I suspect it is more along paizo's lines. DTRPG takes a cut of the sale price so paizo sell their own pdfs. WOTC don't have a setup for that yet so they are holding back on the pdfs until they can sell them themselves. Fingers crossed anyway.

The wierdest thing is why we still haven't heard about the answer, one way or another.

I'm curious how you think you can pull support when everything is usable offline. The dungeons cape program is supposed to work offline so presumably would the books you can read through the program.

It's no different than an ePub. You need an ePub reader to read them but you generally own the epubs you buy.

What's the problem here. What am I missing?