D&D 5E Any word on (Full) 5e PDFs?

[Mishihari Lord]

You can pretty easily bridge the two statements as:

They are creating a situation where only an unreasonable person wouldn't prefer piracy.

But I am not, repeat NOT going to pay $5 a month for just the phb for years on end. I said willing to pay, but not through the nose.

Since when is being honest and moral unreasonable?

 

[Mishihari Lord]

And it happened with every RPG book available for purchase as a PDF. Some people are cheap, some people are entitled, some people just suck. Whatever the personal reason, you could sell the PDF for 5 cents and it would still be torrented immediately upon release and no armchair marketing executive here knows how that effects real sales for a company like wotc. If it is going to be pirated no matter what they do then they have a strong incentive to try to provide something better than the scanned PDF that anyone can already get, which is what Dungeonscape is an attempt to do.

That's an outstanding point. It's really tough to compete with free, especially when the criminals have negligible production costs. Why even try? Building a better product makes a whole lot of sense. It's an open question whether WotC can do a better product though; I understand they don't have a great track record.

 

[Bugleyman]

Everyone who wants to illegally download...will. At best, not selling PDFs might cause a 24-hour delay before a torrent goes up. Why not book some revenue from the people who want to do the right thing, whilst satisfying customers who want an electronic copy (without having to deal with DRM or proprietary software)?

By all means, offer DungeonScape as well. But as 99% of the industry has figured out, water-marked PDFs work. They work across various platforms, and they're a well-understood standard that isn't going anywhere. Sure, we can have long discussions about "optimizing user experience," but customers know what they want...so LET THEM CHOOSE how to consume the content!

Despite the dismissive references to "armchair executives," it doesn't take a genius to notice that this little drama has played out again and again in various media. Eventually, enabling customer choice is always the right answer. Conversely, when you find yourself having to constantly tell customers why they don't really want what they're asking for, you are, quite simply, DOING IT WRONG™.

 

[Mistwell]

You can get the physical dead tree version from Amazon for 29.95.
You should never be expected to pay *more* for a digital product, especially one that should ideally be supplementary or a reference tool.

$10 is a good PDF price. I might go as high as $15. Anything more is gouging and I'll start looking for alternative sources.

The ebook industry differs from your preferences, selling ebooks for about the same as the hardcopy. The proposed price is well below the MSRP of $50 but you're still not satisfied, comparing it to the discounted price, and then saying even that is 50% too high for you.

How can we in one breath argue WOTC needs to get with the times with ebooks, and in another say they need to trailblaze well against the times with their pricing for that same product?

 

[Bugleyman]

As previously stated, I'd gladly pay full retail for PDFs (though I'm probably in the minority).

 

[Mistwell]

We are just starting to see the early signs of book death now. Used book stores are full and either not taking any more books or are going out of business. Small book stores are mostly gone and you're only left with large stores that probably also sell lots of other things besides books. The long slow decline of comic book sales is starting to be felt too despite successful movies. When 500 pounds of books doesn't even take up 1% of the space on your tablet, which can even read them out for you, why buy a book? Current tablets are fast enough that they're now faster to search a PDF than to flip open a book, not to mention lighter and more convenient. Why buy a game book? WotC not selling a digital version is just being customer unfriendly.

You're ignoring one aspect of this ugly truth - it's not that dead tree books are dying, it's that all book purchases are declining overall. People are just not reading novels as much as they used to. Which makes my heart hurt, but it seems to be happening. Not everywhere - people still read a lot in England for instance.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

The ebook industry differs from your preferences, selling ebooks for about the same as the hardcopy. The proposed price is well below the MSRP of $50 but you're still not satisfied, comparing it to the discounted price, and then saying even that is 50% too high for you.

How can we in one breath argue WOTC needs to get with the times with ebooks, and in another say they need to trailblaze well against the times with their pricing for that same product?

ebook prices are generally comparable with a softcover release, which is produced as cheaply as possible. A more relevant comparison is the price of an ebook compared to a new undiscounted hardcover.

In addition, for most ebooks, it's an either/or proposition. You don't usually buy both. For D&D PDFs, there is a large portion of people who want both. This is why bundles are so common among other RPG publishers. Many, if not most, view the PDF as a supplement to what they already paid for.

There's even a trend in some fields, such as programming books, to include the digital versions for free with all print copies. A direction I've wanted to see RPG books take for many years.

 

[prosfilaes]

The ebook industry differs from your preferences, selling ebooks for about the same as the hardcopy.

I don't see that at all. Dark Heresy Second Edition: Core Rulebook is $60 on their website, $45 for print at Amazon, and $30 for PDF on DTRPG. Pathfinder Player Companions are $13 in print ($10 on Amazon) and $9 for PDF, but Pathfinder hardcovers are $40 in print, $24 at Amazon and $10 for PDF. Outside the RPG industry, O'Reilly's AngularJS: Up and Running is $40 for print and $34 in ebook ($17 if you follow their mailing list and wait until it's on sale), and $28 print /$15 Kindle on Amazon. Notes on Set Theory (Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics) is $79 hardcover, $49 softcover and $44 Kindle on Amazon. Oxford's Set Theory: Boolean-Valued Models and Independence Proofs is $178 hardback, $50 softcover and $32 Kindle.

The only one of these that had an ebook more expensive then Amazon print was O'Reilly, and programmers on a budget can almost always get 50% on pretty much any of their ebooks with a little patience, or just grab the Kindle version. Oxford and Paizo both offer certain books in ebook at 75% off their hardcover prices.

Edit: Notes on Set Theory (Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics) is $99, $55 and $40 at the publisher website, making the ebook/print disparity even greater.

 

[Jester David]

The ebook industry differs from your preferences, selling ebooks for about the same as the hardcopy. The proposed price is well below the MSRP of $50 but you're still not satisfied, comparing it to the discounted price, and then saying even that is 50% too high for you.

How can we in one breath argue WOTC needs to get with the times with ebooks, and in another say they need to trailblaze well against the times with their pricing for that same product?

Comparing the regular ebook market with gaming ebooks is apples and pears: they're not quite as different as oranges and seems identical on the surface, but the similarities are mostly superficial.

Regular ebooks tend to have two prices: equivalent to hardcover and equivalent to paperback. The price drops from the former to the latter as the physical copy changes. Gaming books won't downgrade to paperback, so the price shouldn't change over time (unless they decide to put later books on "sale"). They don't need the initial high price for early readers to match the collector/book lover price.
Additionally, many people will buy a second copy of a gaming book as an ebook, which is far less likely to occur with novels or other ebooks; this means gaming ebooks need not be priced the same as if they were replacing physical sales.
And gaming books are likely to be shared amongst a table; one person tends to buys the physical book for the group. The PDF can act as an alternative reference source when not at the game. If priced the same as the physical book (or more) then there's no reason to buy the PDF, they'd just purchase their own copy of the book. Alternatively, for gamers who do not play in the same location as the gaming library (such as conventions or play in stores) the ebook provides portable access without carrying multiple heavy books.

However, unlike novels or other ebooks, gaming products will see also continuous use rather than a single consumption. So one could argue the price could be higher as the price-per-use will be low. But that doesn't offset the above.
Oh, and just because a related market is gouging their customers does not mean you have to gouge your customers. The price of ebooks and related digital media is pretty egregiously high, as you're not paying for the physical production costs. Selling PDFs, even through an intermediary who takes their cut, should reduce expenses by 2/5th to 3/5ths. I have some Print on Demand books on Amazon and the price I need to make the same profit on a physical book is significantly higher than the digital ($12 vs $4), and I'm not getting the discount of high production numbers.

High prices mean more profits per sale but fewer sales, while pricing low means more sales but less profit. I'm sure there's a sweet spot for PDF prices, where lost sales are balanced with high prices. But some serious market research would be needed for this and it likely varies from company to company and product type to product type. Hasbro/WotC likely has the resources to do so, but isn't likely to invest that time for a niche product like D&D.

I'm personally quite happy with Paizo's model. That's close to the industry standard.
They charge a low price for their hardcover books, the products where you're buying a secondary copy. The price ratio between physical and electronic varies if the product is one where you need a secondary copy versus a physical copy, with products such as adventures (not shared between people at the table or used by multiple people at the same time, potentially a reading experience and not a reference tool, less likely to regularly need two pages open at the same time, etc) are priced much higher. The campaign settings books, which are much more flavour than mechanics, are also priced high as PDFs. if you're buying a PDF copy of Dragons Revisited that likely is coming at the expense of a physical copy.

Now, for smaller game companies I can see things pricing differently. They need all the sales they can get just to break even and know that they're unlikely to sell both a digital and physical copy. They need to charge more just to recoup their production costs. So something like Numenera or 13th Age can go a little higher with their PDFs.
But that's not the case with WotC. They're making a profit off their printed books. They'll easily sell enough copies to pay for their production costs, so any PDF sales are a bonus.

Paying for a PDF is also often a courtesy for gaming books. If you own a physical copy you're within your legal rights to make a digital copy. That's covered by the same laws that let you put a CD you own onto your iPod. It's archiving. Like those video game emulator download sites.
Downloading a book you own falls in a legal grey area, and is basically skipping the slow process of scanning a book yourself. Which, frankly, is getting easier and easier since most phones have a camera capable of "scanning" a book pretty quickly. Geeks are pretty tech savvy and possess reasonable Google-Fu, so most can easily get ahold of a PDF if they want. You're paying for a PDF because you want to, so gaming PDFs have to be priced to move.
So far, almost nothing has slowed the piracy of D&D books. There's was a scan of the Monster Manual out before the book was available in non-WPN stores. As such, releasing official PDFs at the standard release date would arguably delay piracy as people would wait and then scrub a purchased copy (and WotC would make at *least* one sale for PDFs opposed to none). The only thing I've seen delay piracy was 5th Edition, which slowed the theft of 4e books as no one wanted to buy them.

WotC could also do things to boost their PDF sales. For Pathfinder organized play, to use an option you either need to have the book or a PDF with your name on it. A similar requirement could be required for D&D Adventurer's League, where you need the watermarked PDF (or book, or DungeonScape with your name). I have bought PDFs just so I can use content in PFS without needing to carry an extra book.

 

[Mistwell]

ebook prices are generally comparable with a softcover release, which is produced as cheaply as possible. A more relevant comparison is the price of an ebook compared to a new undiscounted hardcover.

I don't think that is accurate. If a book is released first as a hardback, the ebook price tends to be close to that hardback price...until the softcover copy is released.

In addition, for most ebooks, it's an either/or proposition. You don't usually buy both.

That's purely a matter of choice for readers though. I own several books in both hardcopy and ebook format, just like some people do for RPGs and others do not. I am not sure personal preference for that is really relevant here for pricing.

There's even a trend in some fields, such as programming books, to include the digital versions for free with all print copies. A direction I've wanted to see RPG books take for many years.

Right, but those books tend to be priced higher than standard books to begin with, so the PDF price is basically factored into the book price.