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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WalterKovacs" data-source="post: 4765978" data-attributes="member: 63763">Piracy may increase physical book sales. However, it seems hard to argue that it increases PDF sales. Unless the pirated copy is of such poor quality that buying the pdf offers a better product, how often would a pirated pdf lead to the sale of a pdf? It might lead to the sale of other pdfs, but only if those pdfs were either (a) better quality than the pirated ones or (b) easier to download (faster download speed/easier to find). The quality issue probably does not come up since the high quality pdfs would just end up getting pirated (which happened with PHB2). ddi is the other part of the equation too. It's possible that, without WOTC creating high quality pdfs that are pirated soon after their release, the quality and/or time before the pirated copy is released and/or ease of finding these pirated copies will go down, and thus make ddi a more appealing option as an alternative to pirating (it takes a week, but you get instant access in arguably amore useful format). The pdfs you pay for vs. the same pdf you can get to free wasn't a very good competition ... ddi vs. pirated from scanned books, a bit of a better fight. In general, a pdf book for most people is going to supplement a hard copy (I downloaded a purchased copy of Song of Ice and Fire in order to build a character, since our group has at least one hard copy to use in play) either from the group, or for themselves. I also have ddi, which means that I use books at the table, while I don't need them during character creation. So, in general, I think the 'pdf-only' market is probably a small enough sub section that piracy is unlikely to have an effect on hardcover sales ... and generally pdfs (sold or pirated) would be competing with ddi for sales. And since ddi is harder to pirate (well, the non-pdf parts of it), that's the one they have decided to keep, while eliminating he pdfs means they aren't helping the pirates or competing with themselves.</blockquote>

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