Arcane Power: How long before the pirated copy appears

[Nightson]

Here's the problem though. You have to make the combined total of all lost online sales of the book ever in the single week it takes to show up as a torrent.

I mean it's out there now, it's not hard to pirate now.

I wonder if WotC will start selling pdfs a week after the book comes out. I mean you can't be losing any sales to pirating from pdfs when there's already a pirated copy out there.

 

[CapnZapp]

Arcane Power is indeed up on the mass torrent sites today.

So I guess the moral of the story is that if you want an electronic version of the book, but want to get it as soon as possible, you're just as well to get a DDI subscription.

You're talking about the compendium right? DDI subscribers don't get "a book" (like they get Dragon Magazine in pdf format) do they? (If they did, that pdf would have hit the nets a week ago, with watermarks scrubbed off)

 

[Bleoberis De Ganis]

Here's the problem though. You have to make the combined total of all lost online sales of the book ever in the single week it takes to show up as a torrent.

I mean it's out there now, it's not hard to pirate now.

I wonder if WotC will start selling pdfs a week after the book comes out. I mean you can't be losing any sales to pirating from pdfs when there's already a pirated copy out there.

If I was WOTC, that would be my plan. Release pdfs a week later because they will be up anyway. I think it is important the hard sellers get to sell at least a week before the pdfs come out.

 

[Dice4Hire]

You're talking about the compendium right? DDI subscribers don't get "a book" (like they get Dragon Magazine in pdf format) do they? (If they did, that pdf would have hit the nets a week ago, with watermarks scrubbed off)

They do not get a pdf. If you wanted you could probably cut and paste things to your heart's content, but it would not be the book.

I don't have DDI, so I don't know for sure how cut and pasting would work,

 

[Kask]

Arcane Power is indeed up on the mass torrent sites today.

So I guess the moral of the story is that if you want an electronic version of the book, but want to get it as soon as possible, you're just as well to get a DDI subscription.

DDI gives you a PDF to own?

 

[Mistwell]

Someone mentioned that you need to cut up the book. Wrong. I have a high end scanner at work that with a touch of the book button, auto corrects for the curvature. Can't even tell you were scanning a book. It also does excellent OCR at the same time. I have made excellent PDFs out of my still intact books. 2 hours was the longest it took me. The machine costs several thousand dollars though.

Cool. I have never heard of that before. I could sure use access to something like that here at work. We have some old books (1940s+/- a decade) on Academic Regalia that I really need to scan, but I didn't want to chop them up.

My brother is a University professor in an Art History department...I bet he has access to something like that.

Sorry for wandering. Anyway, cool, thanks for letting me know about such things.

 

[Mistwell]

I can confirm that Arcane Power is available on the broad torrent sites..

The book is scanned completely, bookmarked, page synced, the quality is not as the other PDF's but everything is complete (no border cuts), and it has copyable text.

Although quality is not high, this shall improve in time..

Guess stopping PDF sales only slowed the pirates and by no means even tried to stop them..

So the conclusion of this poll seems to be "About a week". I think it might have technically been 8 days.

 

[Asmor]

I must say, I'm rather impressed with how long it took...

Still, while a couple weeks is a long time to the "NOW NOW NOW" internet generation, I can't imagine WotC considering such a short delay a success.

 

[Oompa]

Is there a hard study about piracy and sales?

 

[Kask]

Is there a hard study about piracy and sales?

I don't think so. But, there are MANY studies that show the effect of NOT selling what the market is demanding...