Arcane Power: How long before the pirated copy appears

[ender_wiggin]

I'm honestly a little surprised it's not up already. I know it's not a hot item, but it's honestly trivial to scan an entire book. We have document scanners in our public computer labs here at Syracuse. Okay, they're a little pricey (low end $250-300 on Newegg), but that's no real detriment. I would suspect the reason it is taking so long is putting in bookmarks and such, as someone suggested earlier.

There a hundreds of people just waiting for a raw scan; they can finish the bookmarks and clean it up in minutes. The bottleneck is the original scan.

 

[nnms]

Well, demand is the primary force behind supply... No arguing with logic.

There's hasn't been a lot of requests for it on various forums either. Only one on the binary newsgroups. As strange as it sounds, pirates don't seem to be clamouring for it.

 

[WalterKovacs]

I mean, hypothetically, if you could spend resources to stop piracy of your product dead in the water but then found that you didn't recoup the investment in the form of increased sales from people who otherwise would have pirated the product - again, assuming you can reliably determine these numbers - would you still invest in stopping piracy? I guess that's what it comes down to.

I'm guessing they are less interested in the potential for increased sales, but instead to save on the resources it takes to produce quality PDFs, and chase down the pirates, etc. It may just be that pdfs don't actually bring in enough profit to make it worthwhile to make the priates' lives easier.

 

[LightPhoenix]

There a hundreds of people just waiting for a raw scan; they can finish the bookmarks and clean it up in minutes. The bottleneck is the original scan.

No way. Doing flat-top scanning at a pretty decent dpi for an academic presentation, I was able to scan 12 pages (for figures) in less than ten minutes. That counts positioning the book and such. Automated scanning of standard size pages at a decent dpi would take 24 hours, tops. I would guess maybe a minute per page; at 160 pages that's three hours assuming no problems. Newegg doesn't lists time per page for document scanners with automatic feed, but even assuming a highly generous three minutes per page, that's nine hours without problems. Thus, the scanning is trivial. Heck, you leave that overnight and clean it up the next day.

A quality bookmarking in addition to post-scan processing would add additional time to that, possibly another day.

Additionally, hundreds of people is not a lot, based on the scene. Take the latest episode of Heroes, a show which is available on network TV, and the next day on free services such as Hulu (NBC.com uses Hulu). As of this post, the lowest quality rip of the most recent episode was downloaded 328,624 times just from the link at... a common tracker that isn't TPB alone, with another 7,200 downloading it right now. A few hundred people is drops in a bucket. That qualifies it as low interest, and that stuff always takes longer to get out.

 

[ender_wiggin]

It's not that scanning is difficult. It's that it requires sacrifice. A few hundred people is certainly not a lot, and the rare individual who sacrifices his own money is going to be rarer in such a small crowd. That is the bottleneck -- that's why it's the scan.

As for adding bookmarks, I've done this in the past, and it depends on the granularity you want. For example, if you want to bookmark every monster in the MM, it might take you a few hours, but if you only alphabetize them, it takes about 10 minutes. Besides, a low quality bookmark version will spread like an epidemic, and that is the single salient characteristic of piracy.

 

[ender_wiggin]

Regardless of how much money WOTC makes on the pdfs, I don't think that it would cheaper to simply not supply them. Making a quality pdf (in comparison to a bound book) is negligible, and from the response they got from pulling them, plenty of people are willing to buy them legit.

In addition, they have to worry about the image of their product. Given time, there's no question that a version of their work will float around, and it's probably not a bad assumption to say the majority of people who view their product will see the pirated version first. Given that eventuality, were I WOTC, I would want a high-quality copy floating around, as it creates a better image of the product in the collective consumer mind.

 

[Shadowsong666]

Oh, and just now, correctly taking my first guess at the "public forum" ender mentioned, I see that currently chapters 1-3 are now available.

Ha, believe what you like my friend.

edit: My compatriot reports to me that the scan is not poor at all, rather excellent quality actually. That's bard, sorcerer, and swordmage chapters btw.

Thats so funny that i could cry. Now even the pirates got the pdf before i am able finish my own... somehow i am really not amused about all that.

 

[Oompa]

Found the first four chapters, the rest is coming to..

So it took a few days.. did wizards really had increased sales from pulling out the PDF sales?

I don't think so..

 

[WalterKovacs]

Found the first four chapters, the rest is coming to..

So it took a few days.. did wizards really had increased sales from pulling out the PDF sales?

I don't think so..

Let's do a little exercise here.

We have people who fit into group A, they buy the D&D books in hardcover. We have people in group B, they don't buy the books.

We have people in group X, they buy the pdfs when they are available. We have people in group Y, they download pirated pdfs when they are available. We have people in group Z, they don't get pdfs of the D&D books at all.

Finally, we have group D, they subscribe to ddi. (Group E does not).

So, B+Z+E is a massive group, but they are trivial. They have little or no involvement with D&D and are unaffected by the pdf issue. In fact group Z in general is unaffected.

The big questions are:

(a) How many in group X are also in group A? How many buy the book, and pay for it a second time to also own it in pdf format?

(b) How many in group X are also in group D? How many pay monthly to get the information in the compendium and character builder, but also pay to own it in pdf format?

(c) How many in group Y are also in group D? Does having a well documented (bookmarks and the like) pirated copy available around a week before the compendium update discourage anyone from subscribing to ddi?

Again, this is as much my opinion as the 'they were hoping to increase sales by delaying the pirating and they failed' guess is. I believe that in the case of A the group of X+A is much smaller than Y+A (people that buy a hardcopy and just pirate a pdf), so that they weren't getting much money from people willing to pay twice for the same book, so most of their sales were from those that weren't buying the hardcopy. In other words ... I don't think that the hardcopy sales will be impacted by the pdf change.

However, I do think that ddi subscriptions may be changed. DDi is geared towards the same people that would want pdfs. If you want the information on your computer, you can get it either via DDi, or via a pdf. Now, that means you have some options. You can buy the pdf, you can illegally download the pdf, or you can subscribe to DDi ... an you can also do some combination of the pdf and DDi. Now, again, paying for the same information twice based on basically an honor system, isn't necessarily going to translate to big money.

Long story short (too late), the pdf sales of new content for 4e basically equatted to releasing their pdfs for free and asking for donations. The speed that the pirates removed the security stuff and put the same pdf people paid for online was such that someone would only buy it under the honor system. By stopping the sale of pdfs, they at least aren't doing the pirates work for them. There is potential that, the pdfs made by the pirates might not be as high quality, not to mention delayed, which could be the difference for some people between using those pdfs exclusive, or putting down the money for a ddi subscription.

There is also the wild card, as according to the phone call anyway, there is some hope of a new electronic method of selling products that is harder to pirate. If that is the case, the longer they continued selling the pdfs, the longer pirates would be able to strip the security from the files and put them out there for free, and the lower the value of these hypothetical 'new' products would be. At the very least, by discontinuing new products in pdf format, they increase the chance they can sell them if and when this hypothetical new format comes out.

It may not be book sales they are trying to increase. It may be ddi subscriptions, it may be future electronic content, or it may just be that whatever work went into creating the pdf files, however little, wasn't worth having it instantly pirated as soon as it was put up for sale.

 

[Obryn]

Found the first four chapters, the rest is coming to..

So it took a few days.. did wizards really had increased sales from pulling out the PDF sales?

I don't think so..

There's really no way to know.

About the only facts we have are that (1) it's taken a bit of time for it to get online, (2) it's going to be lower quality than the previous buy-wipe-upload process, (3) WotC is not getting any money off the PDFs, and (4) WotC is, by the same token, not spending any money on the PDFs.

-O