Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5428599" data-attributes="member: 58197">It's not that books per se are a waste of time; it's a question of return on investment. There's a big up-front cost to creating a physical book. You have to typeset it, pay for cover and interior art, arrange for distribution, and do a print run, and thanks to the way bookstores and publishers do business, you eat the cost for any of those books that end up sitting on shelves. With so many people now relying on DDI for their regular dose of crunch, it's quite possible that the sales of a typical splatbook have fallen below the point where it's worth the up-front cost of printing.The core manuals will stay in print, but there won't be an endless crunch-stream in book form any more. If 90% of crunch-stream buyers have switched to DDI, this is a logical move. Kind of hard on the other 10%, but that's capitalism for you.(Of course, it's also possible that the books are still profitable in an absolute sense, but the D&D budget simply won't accommodate that up-front cost. If this is the case, it's very bad news.)</blockquote>