A thank you to some PDF publishers

[molonel]

I've bought a lot of PDFs, mostly at RPGnow.com, over the last year. And I'd just like to thank the PDF publishers who publish their PDFs with the ability to highlight, copy and paste text.

The reason is because I run an online game, and I make certain parts of the material available to certain players, but not others. I don't send them the whole PDF. Just a particular feat or ability or advanced class. Always with attribution, and a recommendation for the original product.

For some odd reason, I guess, some PDF publishers must think that they are making their materials safer from piracy or something by locking them down and disallowing copy and paste. Which is odd, because with a couple of materials I finally just sent the whole damn PDF to the player, asked them to print page [whatever] to [whatever], and asked them to delete it afterward.

I try to be scrupulous about PDF purchasing, because I believe in supporting independent publishers. But limiting my ability to use a product that I've paid for makes me less likely to purchase PDFs from that particular publisher, again. There are already people whose products I've stopped using or purchasing for that reason.

Just a thought I wanted to share.

 

[Psion]

Heh. Most do. In fact, I never think to check... and when someone commented that a particular product I happened to have not used yet was locked down, I was a little shocked and annoyed. Had I known that earlier, I would have not bought any more from that publisher. :/

 

[Scribble]

Heh. Most do. In fact, I never think to check... and when someone commented that a particular product I happened to have not used yet was locked down, I was a little shocked and annoyed. Had I known that earlier, I would have not bought any more from that publisher. :/

Yeah, a PDF product where you can't cut and paste is useless to me... I mean I buy them for their functionality. When I'm writing an adventure and I need say a stat block, cutting and pasting is so much easier then re-copying out of a book. If I can't copy then it doesn't really have much of an advantage for me over a book... And I'd rather have a book.


Big thumbs up for copy past, big thumbs down for no copy past... and DRM features in general.

 

[Aussiegamer]

the more recent PDK readers seems to allow cut and paste no matter what.

Also you can do a select all and copy all to a word file...so making it unable to do that seems a waste of time.

I think that though for personal use that is OK but not for giving out to everyone.

Piracy is bad!

 

[molonel]

I think that though for personal use that is OK but not for giving out to everyone.

Piracy is bad!

So .... letting someone copy a feat out of a print book is okay, but sending them the feat in an email is nasty horrible bad?

In the games that I run, I don't WANT them to have the whole book. There are certain feats I've only made availabe to particular characters. And I don't use all of the material out of the books. If it were a print book, I'd photocopy the page and only give them the text that I wanted them to see.

 

[Aussiegamer]

If you own the PDF and want to have a printed copy available for the session for personal use (group included) then I think thats OK, no breach of Copy rights.

But yer posting it to another is BAD!

 

[Justin D. Jacobson]

Speaking for myself I have no problem with sending even large portions of my pdfs to players in their group, e.g., setting history, setting timeline, species info, PC classes, etc. I don't delude myself that everyone in the group should buy a copy of Helios Rising so they can play. That's just absurd. I want people to use my books. So, I don't know what products you're talking about specifically, but if it's Dawning Star, enjoy!

 

[Voadam]

There are a bunch of pdfs with poor copy and paste functionality, I believe not because they wanted to lock up the capability but because the publisher just turned over a hardcopy to dtrpg to turn into a pdf to sell and dtrpg did a minimal poor job of scanning. I am leery of anything with a huge megabyte size that indicates not a thorough scan of the hardcopy.

A couple I have do poorly, some pages are just images with none of the text copyable, others the background pictures block large amounts of the text from copying. WoWRPG Manual of Monsters (Arthaus), Denizens of Dread (Arthaus), Mercenaries (AEG) were disappointing in these respects.

 

[ukgpublishing]

To be honest we expect this as well from players, cutting and pasting a section from our books and printing, emailing, etc is no different from those gamers who photocopy bits of a hard copy book for their players to use in session.

It goes without saying that as a publisher we think piracy is bad but as a publisher of OGL material technically someone could buy our book, take out all the no OGL material, update the section 11, and send the results to all their players without breaching the OGL or copyright, so if an online GM or round the table GM wants to cut and paste a feat or paragraph or two from our books, I have no problem with that.

Laters

 

[Scribble]

There are a bunch of pdfs with poor copy and paste functionality, I believe not because they wanted to lock up the capability but because the publisher just turned over a hardcopy to dtrpg to turn into a pdf to sell and dtrpg did a minimal poor job of scanning. I am leery of anything with a huge megabyte size that indicates not a thorough scan of the hardcopy.

A couple I have do poorly, some pages are just images with none of the text copyable, others the background pictures block large amounts of the text from copying. WoWRPG Manual of Monsters (Arthaus), Denizens of Dread (Arthaus), Mercenaries (AEG) were disappointing in these respects.

Yeah, seems like the old stuff is like that. The stuff from the early days where there wasn't an electronic file I guess... At DTR they're all marked as scanned image book, and tend to have large file sizes. I try not to buy them either, as they're a pain the-