Charles Ryan on Watermarked PDFs

[reanjr]

Maybe, but won't there be a trail there — Seymor Butts has to pay for the PDF somehow, which means that credit card or PayPal, there's going to be some identification somewhere. At least in theory.

Nick

Paypal as a security measure is a joke.

 

[lior_shapira]

People who want to break the law will always succeed, see all the security measures the music industry tried to use. But the real success of these small non-intrusive measures is reducing the amount of piracy. It's harder now to trade in illegal pdf's and I estimate that will reduce traffic by over 90%. And that's really all that's needed.

lior

 

[GlassJaw]

It's harder now to trade in illegal pdf's and I estimate that will reduce traffic by over 90%.

I wouldn't be so sure of that.... :\

 

[Voadam]

THe PDF industry is still new. Sure some devoted PDF companies have found success, but moving from print to PDF is something that really hasn't been done and analyzed. Some comapines like Wizards and Green Ronin are slowly seeing what a few releases does for them in PDF. Others like Mongoose seem to be placing lots of older titles on PDF and seeing what happens.

Except that WotC used to put out tons of out of print stuff cheaply on unrestricted pdfs and, I believe according to Jim Butler who handled the program, was making and makes plenty of money off of the sales of older edition stuff. Just not enough for Hasbro levels of happiness for them to put in the effort to put out more. I know I have dozens of pdfs of the older stuff I bought and will continue to buy more as time goes on.

However at full price and DRM restricted I will not be getting anything from them, and I am one of the minority of customers who prefer products in pdf format.