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<blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 7660010" data-attributes="member: 22424">When they pulled the PDFs a few years ago, the stated reason was indeed piracy concerns. In particular, someone had put a legally-purchased (watermarked) PDF of, IIRC, &quot;Arcane Power II&quot; on one of the torrent sites, and it had been downloaded some thousands of times.(Note: the initial purchase of the PDF was done legally. Obviously, putting it up for further distribution was not.)It's worth noting that at that time they also required the vendors of PDFs to stop allowing further downloads of those PDFs. There was a grace period of about a week for this; unfortunately, I was on holiday for just over a week when this all went down, and so lost some (very few) PDFs that I had purchased but not yet downloaded.A couple of years ago, they changed their policy, and now allow PDFs sales again through a single vendor. Plus, the PDFs that are now being made available are better than the older ones, which is nice.They haven't, as yet, made the core rulebooks for most editions available for download (IIRC, B/X is available, as is the Rules Cyclopedia, but that's all). Given that they're selling PDFs at all, the reason for this is very unlikely to be piracy concerns, so what Morrus says about vendors wanting a delay makes sense. (Note that printed core books for 1st, 2nd, 3e, 4e, and 5e are all easily available in stores; B/X and the Rules Cyclopedia are pretty much the only ones that aren't.) But, AFAIK, WotC have never put out any official word as to why.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="delericho, post: 7660010, member: 22424"] When they pulled the PDFs a few years ago, the stated reason was indeed piracy concerns. In particular, someone had put a legally-purchased (watermarked) PDF of, IIRC, "Arcane Power II" on one of the torrent sites, and it had been downloaded some thousands of times. (Note: the initial purchase of the PDF was done legally. Obviously, putting it up for further distribution was not.) It's worth noting that at that time they [i]also[/i] required the vendors of PDFs to stop allowing further downloads of those PDFs. There was a grace period of about a week for this; unfortunately, I was on holiday for just over a week when this all went down, and so lost some (very few) PDFs that I had purchased but not yet downloaded. A couple of years ago, they changed their policy, and now allow PDFs sales again through a single vendor. Plus, the PDFs that are now being made available are better than the older ones, which is nice. They haven't, as yet, made the core rulebooks for most editions available for download (IIRC, B/X is available, as is the Rules Cyclopedia, but that's all). Given that they're selling PDFs at all, the reason for this is very unlikely to be piracy concerns, so what Morrus says about vendors wanting a delay makes sense. (Note that printed core books for 1st, 2nd, 3e, 4e, and 5e are all easily available in stores; B/X and the Rules Cyclopedia are pretty much the only ones that [i]aren't[/i].) But, AFAIK, WotC have never put out any official word as to why. [/QUOTE]

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