How Much Do You Care About Form Factor/Book Size?

[DragonLancer]

Rulebooks, source books, adventure paths/campaigns and bestiaries, for me, need to be A4 and hardback.

Adventure modules should still be A4 but I can live with them being softback since they will get more flipping through them.

 

[payn]

I prefer PDF these days. Though, font size is going to be a big decided when I do go physical.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

For gaming materials, it depends on how the text and illos are formatted. If images are generally simple and if the text is large enough, uses bullets/indents, tables, etc, or otherwise mostly highly formatted, I don't mind smaller sizes. For denser things or more traditional "rulebook" styles (eg, double columns, complex/color art, elaborate maps, etc) I prefer larger sizes.

Yeah basically this. I have little inherent preference, but I absolutely loathe books that feel like they've been inappropriately compressed down to "digest" format - which in my experience is about 20-30% of "digest" format RPGs, and you never know which until you get them!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I really like OSR books generally being digest size, as kind of a symbolic break with D&D. I can glance at my shelf and spot most of the indie games that way.

For actual practical use, though? It really doesn't matter. You can have a poorly designed traditional book just as easily (and arguably more often) than a digest-sized book.

And I love that the 3E third-party setting book Redhurst: Academy of Magic is laid out as an 11" x 8 1/2" book (yes, horizontally), emulating a college brochure.

I'm not quite @philreed -- whose newest RPG is literally a soda can and soda -- but I love when publishers play with format.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

Form factor is definitely something that can heighten my enjoyment of an RPG book with good content. That is true even for pdf format.

 

[Scribe]

- whose newest RPG is literally a soda can and soda

This was quite literally looking at my screen, my wife, and back.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This was quite literally looking at my screen, my wife, and back.

I suspect Phil spends a lot of his time looking through the internet for things he can get custom produced and saying "hmm, what RPG product could I put on a custom-printed towel?" (A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy inspired RPG, Phil, to answer the question.)

 

[Autumnal]

Like several others, I almost exclusively buy PDF. In print, I very strongly prefer digest size, and it’s been years since I bought a letter-sized or larger book.

 

[Crusadius]

I like digest-size books as they are easy to carry. I don't like digest-size books because they are usually light on content.

The reverse can be said about letter-sized books. So I'm not sure there is a good size for me.

 

[aramis erak]

Does the size of a book influence your decision whether or not to buy it? For example, do you prefer (or avoid) zine-sized books as oppposed to full-size (A4/8.5x11") books?

As long as it's not unusually large or unusually small sizes (Not bigger than 9"×12" nor smaller than 4"×6"), and the text is readable, I'm not picky.
I don't like landscape once it exceeds 6"×7"... the Classic Traveller Big Floppy Books (BFBs) were letter landscape, and the BFB's were awful hard to use away from the table.