D&D 5E Where are the PDFs?

[Jester David]

The lack of PDFs irks me. I just flew down to GenCon and having the PHB on my iPad would have been very handy. I only carried a single Pathfinder book, relying on digital copies for my character. And with a subscription to the PF RPG line, kickstarter, and pre-orders I cannot remember the last time I didn't have the PDF weeks before the physical book. Many times I'll have finished reading the product cover to cover before my dead tree copy arrives.
It's weird not being able to looking PHB content up on the fly. Sometimes I find myself pulling out my iPad or hitting dropbox to check a rule while writing content, only to discover nothing. Having to get up, walk down a flight of stairs to my gaming librarian, and flip through a book is incredibly inconvenient.

I'm really tempted to just download a scan, as having a digital copy of a physical book is arguably no less illegal than copying a CD onto your iPod. Format shifting is legal in Canada, as is digital archiving.
We'll see how irritated I get in the next few weeks.


I imagine electronic books are tied up with Dungeonscape, in that you pay for a digital copy of the book which unlocks that book for use with the app. That way people don't just gain access to all the content by signing up for a month. It could also be handled by in-app purchases, making getting the content relatively easy.

But this means that until Dungeonscape is ready to take payment and handle distribution, they can't sell any PDFs.

Of course, software development is slow. And Trapdoor Technologies are a rookie company. So we can't expect the program to be finished anytime soon.

 

[Echohawk]

The OP is making some unsupported leaps of logic to conclude that not offering PDFs at this stage is a bad business decision on WotC's part. Nobody except WotC has sufficient information to be able to assess that.

The potential base of Player's Handbook users consists of the following groups:

1. People who will buy only the print PH, whether or not there is a legal PDF available.
2. People who will buy the print PH, and will download an illegal copy of the PDF whether or not there is a legal PDF available.
3. People who will not buy the print PH, and will download an illegal copy of the PDF whether or not there is a legal version available.

For the purposes of determining whether it makes business sense for WotC to offer PDFs, the people in groups 1-3 are irrelevant, since they will never buy legal PDFs.

We also have the following groups:

4. People who will buy the print PH, and will also buy a PDF if it is legally available.
5. People who will not buy the print PH, but will buy a PDF if it is legally available.
6. People who will buy a legal PDF instead of the print PH, but who will buy the print PH if no PDF is available.

The folks in groups 4 and 5 will add to WotC's bottom line if PDFs are available. Both of these groups may or may not download an illegal PDF if there is no legal version available, but they definitely represent potential lost sales for WotC.

The folks in group 6 represent a more complicated group. If there were PDFs available right now, they'd be buying those instead of the print versions. We don't know what the profit margin on a PDF is compared to the profit margin on a print product, so we have no idea whether WotC would gain or lose by making a legal PDF available to this group right now. However, this is a group who will buy the print version in the absence of a legal PDF, so they don't represent lost sales.

In the early days of 4e, WotC made PDFs available at the same time as the print versions of each product. Then they stopped releasing PDFs altogether. We can therefore presume that they have some idea of the impact of offering simultaneous PDF releases on print sales.

Now, let's say the potential profit from groups 4 and 5 is X (where X must be a positive number). And the potential change in profit from group 6 is Y (where Y could be a positive or negative number. Finally, let's assume that the cost of offering PDFs is Z (and there will be a cost, it is wishful thinking to assume otherwise).

Then, we can say that if WotC offers PDFs, they will see an increase in profits equal to X±Y-Z. Importantly, there is absolutely no guarantee that this is a positive number. It might be, or it could be negative, making it a bad idea for WotC to offer PDFs. Only WotC has enough information to be able to judge this. We do not.

It may also be the the case that offering PDFs, say, six months after the print release, moves some of the people in group 6 to group 4 -- they will buy the print version now, in the absence of a PDF, but they will make an extra PDF purchase when the PDF is made available for sale later. If a delayed PDF release changes the result of X±Y-Z in a good way, then that's a good business decision for WotC.

Hmmm... that was a much longer-winded post than I'd intended!

Short version: The OP does not have sufficient information to know whether WotC offering simultaneous print/PDF releases is a good business decision. Jumping to that conclusion based on a personal desire to have a legal PDF does not make it true.

 

[Hawkwind]

I'm in group 7 I brought a PHB, scanned and OCR'd it for my own use for Fantasy grounds VVT but would buy a good quality PDF. I imagine there are people who own the book would like a legal copy but will take or make a copy in the absence of a legal copy and incase any one else asks no you can't have a copy of pdf, I only did the spells anyway

 

[Torg Smith]

WotC has a right to sell their product any way they want. You have the right to choose to buy it or not.

If they do not sell it in a way you want, don’t buy it. Play another game. Don’t pull down pirated versions of the game as you will just create artificial demand for the game. There are plenty of vendors that produce good games in PDF. Play their games. It supports them, and makes them want to produce more PDFs.

As far as DungeonScape, the documents will be in a proprietary format with account authentication tied to it. Your access will only remain while Trapdoor is in business and the contract with WotC is in effect. I have laughed at a lot of people who have cried when an authentication server was taken off line. Accept your time with those documents can be quite limited.

Edit: Now if I bought PDFs of the books, I would not have a problem with purchasing the content in DungeonScape as I would only be buying it for the use in that software. The PDFs would be viable long after that software was not.

 

[Jer]

Yeah, and what D&D has that none of those have (excepting maybe Pathfinder at this point) is an especially intimate relationship with booksellers. WotC has a retail network that's very important to them. That network gets primacy, understandably.

This. Wizards is still trying to figure out how all of this is going to work. And I strongly suspect that ALL of the mistakes of the 4e rollout have been examined and a concerted effort has been made to not make those mistakes again.

One of the mistakes was to change direction on PDF sales during the 4e rollout. We don't really know what the behind-the-scenes drama of the PDF debacle was, but it took a long time for them to reverse that bonehead move and put out of print items back for sale as PDFs again.

Even now you may note that NONE of the 1e, 2e, 3e or 4e PH, MMs or DMGs are on sale as PDFs at dndclassics.com. (The 4e Dungeon Master's Kit is there, though). Not coincidentally, these are the rulebooks that they brought back into print for the past few years and as far as I can tell, they're still all in print and available at fine local booksellers as well as online. I would not be surprised if the plan was to keep the core rulebooks in print and reserve PDFs for out of print material. (I hope I'm wrong about that, but I strongly suspect that's their current direction based on what they've been doing since the dndclassics.com rollout).

 

[fjw70]

Interesting point about proprietary formats. Obviously we don't have any info on the format the DS Ebook will take (or does the company have a proprietary format they have used for other stuff).

i know Privateer Press just used their app as a way to distribute PDFs and ever though they didn't want you to you could extract the PDF from their app (which I did). Kindle uses a proprietary app for books

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?

 

[Thaumaturge]

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?

Yep. There are programs that let you download your kindle books and remove the DRM from them. They still work on the kindle devices after that, too. The main problem is you have to be proactive. You can't wait until after the kindle servers are taken offline.

Thaumaturge.

 

[ccooke]

Yep. There are programs that let you download your kindle books and remove the DRM from them. They still work on the kindle devices after that, too. The main problem is you have to be proactive. You can't wait until after the kindle servers are taken offline.

Thaumaturge.

You don't even need to do that. The encryption scheme and what is used for the key is known and findable, even if Amazon went away.

 

[SilentBoba]

WotC has a right to sell their product any way they want. You have the right to choose to buy it or not.

If they do not sell it in a way you want, don’t buy it. Play another game. Don’t pull down pirated versions of the game as you will just create artificial demand for the game. There are plenty of vendors that produce good games in PDF. Play their games. It supports them, and makes them want to produce more PDFs.

As far as DungeonScape, the documents will be in a proprietary format with account authentication tied to it. Your access will only remain while Trapdoor is in business and the contract with WotC is in effect. I have laughed at a lot of people who have cried when an authentication server was taken off line. Accept your time with those documents can be quite limited.

Edit: Now if I bought PDFs of the books, I would not have a problem with purchasing the content in DungeonScape as I would only be buying it for the use in that software. The PDFs would be viable long after that software was not.

I bought the PHB. I'll probably scan it at some point for my own use because frankly I don't like printed media now that I'm used to reading nearly everything electronically.

Since you're enumerating WotC's "rights" in your statement above, I'll say that those of us who believe in the game system in question (I'm a D&D fan, not just an RPG fan), and also believe in electronic book formats, have the right to complain that the product they want is not available in the format that is most desirable. Franky if nearly the entire industry has leaned toward PDF as a coequal primary format, then that's even more justification to take a jab at WotC/Hasbro for dragging its feet. Of course I can buy other products from other companies instead, but valid customer complaints are an important resource for a publisher to adjust their product and their approach.

DungeonScape looks to be an awesome product. But it's ultimately only a safe bet if you can wall off both user-added and reference text from the server via backup or some other means. It supposedly will have an offline mode, which is great, but it seems that the next time you connect, all your resources could get nuked in a heartbeat by an errant update or by intentional tampering. I'm looking forward to using the product since I DM from my laptop and appreciate if portions of the game can be pushed to my players' mobile devices, but if I don't have a means of protecting that data, including any reference material upon which my custom stuff is built, then I'm GMing on a ledge.

 

[Bugleyman]

Short version: The OP does not have sufficient information to know whether WotC offering simultaneous print/PDF releases is a good business decision. Jumping to that conclusion based on a personal desire to have a legal PDF does not make it true.

Only that isn't what I did. I expressed my personal desire, and then went on to explain why I think it is ALSO a mistake. The argument that "only WotC as sufficient information to make a correct decision" is patently false. First, no one has perfect information. Second, they clearly got 4E wrong; by your logic, that shouldn't have happened (Frankly, if you study business a bit, you may come to be amazed at just how often big companies make glaringly obvious missteps. I know I was).

Yes I want PDFs. I also believe not offering PDFs is a huge mistake. Finally, I believe that the failure to produce the products customers demand is indicative of an ongoing leadership failure at WotC, especially in a market where PDFs are the industry norm. You're free to disagree with my position, of course, but please don't dismiss distort what I'm saying.