A Technical Look at D&D Insider Applications

[Lonely Tylenol]

I'm looking into getting one of those ebook readers... They use digital paper, which doesn't have the problems of backlit screen text.

Problems:
1. As far as I know, they only display in B&W
2. Dedicated hardware defeats the purpose of using my laptop to organize my gaming materials. Not only PDFs, but excel sheets, the internet (my wiki, SRD, useful online tools like d20srd.org's encounter calculator), character sheet blanks for printing, etc.
3. Extra cost for a piece of hardware with very limited use. I already own a laptop, and it does other stuff besides read PDFs.

Those readers are kind of neat, but not terribly useful for what I want to use them for.

 

[Scribble]

Problems:
1. As far as I know, they only display in B&W
2. Dedicated hardware defeats the purpose of using my laptop to organize my gaming materials. Not only PDFs, but excel sheets, the internet (my wiki, SRD, useful online tools like d20srd.org's encounter calculator), character sheet blanks for printing, etc.
3. Extra cost for a piece of hardware with very limited use. I already own a laptop, and it does other stuff besides read PDFs.

Those readers are kind of neat, but not terribly useful for what I want to use them for.

Shrug. Sorry for your troubles?

Not sure if they're just black and white, because they supposedly can display pictures? (Unless they only display them in black and white, which seems strange...)

Would pint books solve the problem?

I'm looking into getting one for the purpose of reading the PDFs, and making my backpack much lighter at gaming sessions. When preparing for games I'll use my computer and then print out the materials I need same as I always do.

 

[Scribble]

As for the books secret code... My guess is that:

1. WOTC as My Rouse said will give people the benefit of the doubt when they call and say their code doesn't work. (I mean if you're a thief wouldn't it be easier for you to just go and get a new code, rather then call WOTC and give them your details???)

2. If someone routinely registers products that later get registered by numerous others, they can look into that person. (Who's most likely a thief...)

3. The PDFs (or whatever they end up being) will probably have the code embedded in them somewhere... If it goes up online, they can see who done it.

Shrug. All in all, it's not my concern.

WOTC has said through Mr Rouse that if there is a problem with my code I can call, and CS will handle it. Nuff said. Worrying about the details is WOTC's job, not mine. As a customer I just know I'll have my product.

 

[RFisher]

I suspect they'll have very interesting numbers for piracy which -- if they share them -- could be useful for deciding what kind of protection WotC might need.

They do share some numbers on their site. At least they used to.

Of course, the thing about Baen is that they don't make the mistake of trying to measure piracy. They measure sales. Books that they made available for free downloading actually sold better than other books. Who cares how many people may have pirated anything when you see a real increase in the bottom line?

There's no doubt that Baen's & Wizards' businesses are quite different, though. The lesson to learn from Baen, I think, is that it can be worthwhile to put aside the conventional wisdom & guessing & actually experiment.

Those readers are kind of neat, but not terribly useful for what I want to use them for.

I would have never bought my eBook myself, but once I had it I fell in love with it.

But, while it is great for fiction, I have to agree with the doctor that it hasn't worked as well for me for RPG books. A more open & standard platform would serve me better for the game table.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Shrug. Sorry for your troubles?

Not sure if they're just black and white, because they supposedly can display pictures? (Unless they only display them in black and white, which seems strange...)

The technology for creating coloured e-paper has been developed, but I've never seen any indication that it's been implemented. There's a list of e-paper readers in production over at Wikipedia, and all of them are greyscale. I think that they have been having problems with getting the resolution of colour e-paper high enough to make it viable.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I would have never bought my eBook myself, but once I had it I fell in love with it.

But, while it is great for fiction, I have to agree with the doctor that it hasn't worked as well for me for RPG books. A more open & standard platform would serve me better for the game table.

I think part of the problem is resolution. How big is a fiction paperback page? How big is an RPG book page? How are you going to squeeze that onto a device that was designed to display a paperback-sized block of text? Also, given that the resolution of one of these readers is usually no more than 160 dpi, it is probably quite difficult to display reduced images and text without it all going terribly blocky.

 

[Scribble]

The technology for creating coloured e-paper has been developed, but I've never seen any indication that it's been implemented. There's a list of e-paper readers in production over at Wikipedia, and all of them are greyscale. I think that they have been having problems with getting the resolution of colour e-paper high enough to make it viable.

Yeah, upon looking at the sony one I've been looking at, I see while it does view jpegs I think it's intended to view documents saved as Jpeg. (so black and white wouldn't matter.)

In any case, black and white doesn't matter much to me... It would only be for reading the whole book/magazine or looking up rules on the go. No for game prep... That would be at my computer.

 

[RFisher]

I think part of the problem is resolution. How big is a fiction paperback page? How big is an RPG book page? How are you going to squeeze that onto a device that was designed to display a paperback-sized block of text? Also, given that the resolution of one of these readers is usually no more than 160 dpi, it is probably quite difficult to display reduced images and text without it all going terribly blocky.

I'm going to format the text for the device.

Which is why PDF isn't my ideal. As long as it's a PDF that I can extract the text from it without too much pain, though, then I can at least make an attempt at indexing it, reformatting it, & writing scripts to slice & dice it.

My eBook won't handle PDF, paperback sized or no. Even when starting with plain text or bad HTML I unfortunately often have to write a script to munge it a bit before trying to put it on the eBook.

Although, after playing around with an iPhone & an iPod touch, they've made a decent start on how to handle the problem of reading things not meant for a palmtop on a palmtop. I should remember to try out a PDF the next chance I get. Though it'd still be better to use more liquid formats.

 

[IanArgent]

Oh, I would rahter have something more flexible than PDF as well. PDF is about my least favorite format for reading on an electronic device; since the layout is fixed; and cannot be adjusted fro the specifics of your device. Give me HTML at the level of D&D inseider (which comes up quite usable on my PDA), give me an RTF, etc. PDF is nice, but I can make one anytime I like.

 

[Alan Shutko]

Give me HTML at the level of D&D inseider (which comes up quite usable on my PDA), give me an RTF, etc. PDF is nice, but I can make one anytime I like.

What browser do you use? With Mobile IE, I can't log into D&D Insider, though I can read the non-protected content.