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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cthulhudrew" data-source="post: 3375621" data-attributes="member: 4090">Not to derail the thread overmuch with comics talk, but I think a big part of the TPB phenomenon has to do with the prospect of getting an entire story in one sitting, rather than having to wait several months as it is serialized (not to mention not having x pages of advertisements breaking it up). The whole concept of "decompressed" storylines (aka, "writing for the trades") has kind of grown up around the notion that these stories will be collected in a tpb at some point, and thus you get a lot less of the "done-in-one" single issues that used to be a hallmark of comics, and eased the month-long wait between fixes. Nowadays, there is far more of the story-arc mentality going on, where you'll get a 6 issue arc, spread out over 6 (or more) months of real time, and a tpb bypasses that wait (although there is a subsequent wait for the entire period to be over, real time). Personally, I'm in agreement with a comic retailer friend of mine who thinks that the comic companies would do better to go direct to trade and do away with the monthly "floppies" (as he calls them) altogether. Not quite sure how that would affect them in terms of advertising revenue, which is a major part of their bottom line, though.In any event, to try and bring this back to the topic at hand- collecting all the AP in one easy to use volume would in many ways be the same as the tpb format- you don't have to wait a month between issues, you don't have extraneous information (other adventures, ads, etc.). The downside is that you do have to wait for the entire thing to be complete (a year+), but to address JoeGKushner's point about non-subscribers being willing to buy, I'd say there is definitely quite a bit of precedent for it. Paying $75 for all 12 issues plus a lot of the extras that appeared in Dragon as well as Dungeon, as opposed to paying upwards of $96 just for those issues of Dungeon magazine (more if you throw in the Dragon bonuses). (Yes, a subscription would be considerably cheaper, but I'm assuming we're talking about people who aren't regular Dungeon readers, and who are only interested in the Adventure Path itself.)</blockquote>

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