Do Tariffs Apply To RPG Books? Maybe, Maybe Not!

Morrus · 2025-04-30T19:22:18+0100

Sacrosanct said:
I guess that depends on your print run. And to view it from a customer's perspective. They typically don't care about how the sausage is made, so-to-speak, they only look at the product. And as a customer, I'd have a hard time paying nearly as much for a digital copy as I do a print physical product. Then again, maybe I'm archaic and out of touch with modern customers. That's a real possibility.

You gotta do what you gotta do. I’m sure you know how to run your business. I’m just telling you how I run mine.

Luckily there has been a slowly but steady increase in public understanding of the value of the intellectual work in a product, and that has been commensurate with a very slow but actual increase in the wages of the creators and artists. It’s being somewhat undercut recently by the AI proponents, sadly, but I am hopeful that people will continue to recognise that the material itself has great value and the trend will continue.

dragoner · 2025-04-30T19:23:09+0100

PDF's are a chore, more work than the regular book layout. I once had publisher collapse and lose hundreds of bookmarks.

Belen · 2025-04-30T19:37:07+0100

Morrus said:
The print run is usually one of the smallest costs involved in producing a product. The art, the writing, the editing, the layout…. all that is what costs the money. The $3 per unit (or whatever) on the print run is just a tiny fraction of the total cost. Seems weird to assign the largest part of the price to the smallest part of the development costs.

This.

Printing and mailing is the least of my expenses for production.

Wofano Wotanto · 2025-04-30T19:44:19+0100

Morrus said:
Luckily there has been a slowly but steady increase in public understanding of the value of the intellectual work in a product, and that has been commensurate with a very slow but actual increase in the wages of the creators and artists. It’s being somewhat undercut recently by the AI proponents, sadly, but I am hopeful that people will continue to recognise that the material itself has great value and the trend will continue.

Granted, but part of the reason pdfs are frequently seen as being worth significantly less that physical books is because if a pdf buyer wants to use the "let Kinkos do it" approach to getting a hardcopy, it usually winds up costing the customer a lot more than the $3 a big fancy hardcover a publisher would would have paid. As a publisher it's easy to regard printing costs as a relatively trivial part of the whole. As a customer that's nowhere near as obvious, and educating people is hard.

Morrus · 2025-04-30T19:52:42+0100

Wofano Wotanto said:
As a publisher it's easy to regard printing costs as a relatively trivial part of the whole. As a customer that's nowhere near as obvious, and educating people is hard.

Educating people is hard, but I’m encouraged by the progress the industry has made in the last 10 years or so and I’m hopeful it will continue.

Belen · 2025-04-30T20:11:07+0100

Wofano Wotanto said:
Granted, but part of the reason pdfs are frequently seen as being worth significantly less that physical books is because if a pdf buyer wants to use the "let Kinkos do it" approach to getting a hardcopy, it usually winds up costing the customer a lot more than the $3 a big fancy hardcover a publisher would would have paid. As a publisher it's easy to regard printing costs as a relatively trivial part of the whole. As a customer that's nowhere near as obvious, and educating people is hard.

It’s volume. It is pretty easy to understand that printing 1 book versus printing 1000 is a different price proposal.

It makes sense to bundle a PDF with a print book or add 10 for a bundle.

People need to understand that the content costs more to produce than the output format.

People should charge the price less that print and mail costs for the PDF unless you are only buying a license.

Also, a PDF library costs more to maintain over time. A publisher with a store and who maintains accounts etc pays ongoing maintenance and upkeep.

Staffan · 2025-04-30T20:12:41+0100

Morrus said:
The print run is usually one of the smallest costs involved in producing a product. The art, the writing, the editing, the layout…. all that is what costs the money. The $3 per unit (or whatever) on the print run is just a tiny fraction of the total cost. Seems weird to assign the largest part of the price to the smallest part of the development costs.

From a customer perspective, it's not just the physical production that makes it feel like PDFs should be significantly cheaper than hardcopy. It's also cutting out at least one middle-man. Traditionally, physical RPG books come from a publisher, go to a distributor, and then to a retailer before the end customer buys it. With a PDF, the chain is instead publisher to e-store (e.g. DTRPG) to end customer, and sometimes not even that (though in that case the publisher takes on the expense of running the store themselves, so it's sort of a wash).

I saw somewhere (might have been in one of these threads) that typically, MSRP is set at 6x physical production costs. I understand that it's usually more complex than that, but it will serve as an example. Further, the publisher usually sells to a distributor at a 60% discount on MSRP, who then sells on to the retailer at 50% discount (again, simplified). So, let's say you have a book with an MSRP of $60. The cut is then something like this:
$30 to retailer.
$6 to distributor.
$10 to production.
Leaving $14 net to the publisher, which is then used to pay creators and ideally make some actual profit as well.

If you sell via DTRPG, it is my understanding that their cut is 30% of the sales price if you sell exclusively via them, or 35% if you can sell it in other places as well. We can round this off to saying they take 1/3 of the sales price, which means that you can get a sales price by taking what money you as a publisher wants and adding 50%. So from that perspective, $21 would be a "fair" price for the book in question. Adding in some additional cost for convenience (you don't need to do bookmarks and internal hyperlinks and possibly layers in a physical book, but they're pretty neat to have in a PDF), a discount on the PDF of 30-50% compared to the physical book doesn't seem unrealistic.

Morrus · 2025-04-30T20:22:22+0100

Staffan said:
From a customer perspective, it's not just the physical production that makes it feel like PDFs should be significantly cheaper than hardcopy.

Feelings won’t make selling things at less than it costs to make them a sensible business choice. If customers won’t pay what a product costs to make, then the product has no viability. This is business 101!

Anyhow, I’m not seeking debate or business advice. I just answered a question.

Belen · 2025-04-30T20:56:13+0100

Staffan said:
From a customer perspective, it's not just the physical production that makes it feel like PDFs should be significantly cheaper than hardcopy. It's also cutting out at least one middle-man. Traditionally, physical RPG books come from a publisher, go to a distributor, and then to a retailer before the end customer buys it. With a PDF, the chain is instead publisher to e-store (e.g. DTRPG) to end customer, and sometimes not even that (though in that case the publisher takes on the expense of running the store themselves, so it's sort of a wash).

I saw somewhere (might have been in one of these threads) that typically, MSRP is set at 6x physical production costs. I understand that it's usually more complex than that, but it will serve as an example. Further, the publisher usually sells to a distributor at a 60% discount on MSRP, who then sells on to the retailer at 50% discount (again, simplified). So, let's say you have a book with an MSRP of $60. The cut is then something like this:
$30 to retailer.
$6 to distributor.
$10 to production.
Leaving $14 net to the publisher, which is then used to pay creators and ideally make some actual profit as well.

If you sell via DTRPG, it is my understanding that their cut is 30% of the sales price if you sell exclusively via them, or 35% if you can sell it in other places as well. We can round this off to saying they take 1/3 of the sales price, which means that you can get a sales price by taking what money you as a publisher wants and adding 50%. So from that perspective, $21 would be a "fair" price for the book in question. Adding in some additional cost for convenience (you don't need to do bookmarks and internal hyperlinks and possibly layers in a physical book, but they're pretty neat to have in a PDF), a discount on the PDF of 30-50% compared to the physical book doesn't seem unrealistic.

Publishers often pay non-living wages to content producers too in order to account for the distribution model.

Amazon, for instance, only pays 30% or less to people who sell ebooks through them.

PDF publishing is difficult because many people see it as “less value” and publishers often charge less to manage expectations.

I like cheap PDFs too and I think they should be discounted over time to account for age. I am bugged when something new comes out and they are charging 15 for a brand new ebook and people scream about the price.

TheAlkaizer · 2025-04-30T21:07:20+0100

Morrus is right that it's a balance between what makes sense for the publishers and the buyer.

For reasons that are hard to explain, I would never pay 60$ for a PDF. I do it all the time with books, even if they have the same content. It's not entirely logical, I think it really stems that it feels like the PDF is nothing. It's something I can copy, I can delete.

But one place where I disagree is the need to educate the customers. You can explain everything that you want, I'll never pay 60$ for a PDF. You can try to explain to someone that the 30$ they pay for a burger at the restaurant is also paying for the building, the wages, the ingredients, the experience, cleaning the facility and every other expenses encountered by the business, I'm still not paying 30$ for a burger. Understanding the economics often has very little effect on customers behaviors.

I also find that publishers tend to hold two opposite discourse:

On one hand, they'll say that it's OK to price a PDF at 40$ and the book at 60$, because the PDF had almost just has much work going into it (design, art, writing, etc) and that the additional expenses of the physical product are a smaller sliver. I shouldn't look at the outputted product, but the inputted work.
On the other hand, they'll sometimes not include the PDF with the physical book. Didn't I just purchased for the inputted work? If the outputted work doesn't matter, why should I have to buy the content twice?

Now, don't get me wrong. I am not at all dissatisfied with the state of the industry. I'm buying ton of stuff, I'm comfortable with the prices and most practices. But these are still interesting topics to think about. The concept of value is incredibly vague. I work in the video games industry, and customers will mostly use the infamous time of play divided by cost to put value on an interactive experience. "I'm not paying 60$ for a 10 hours game." But what if that experience moves you? What if it's shorter but has something really new and fresh? Or the quality is just higher? It's incredibly difficult to understand these motivations.

Do Tariffs Apply To RPG Books? Maybe, Maybe Not!

The Shipping Tariff Lottery #shorts

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TheAlkaizer

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