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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orcus" data-source="post: 3150724" data-attributes="member: 1254">Henry, your answer to Christoph is essentially correct.We didnt grudgingly join DTRPG. We joined with enthusiasm, but we didnt have high hopes of it as a medium for product delivery. As he stated, my view was that it would mostly help those fans who couldnt get the print books. That was just my view of what the business model would address. Dont think that means I dont love PDFs and havent been waiting for the day when I saw a means to consider pdfs as a viable primary product strategy. We started out with pdfs with Wizards Amulet. And now that OBS is around, I think primary pdf is now a viable product strategy from publishers that previously have been print publishers. Which is a good thing for everyone.When we joined up with DTRPG I saw a fragmented pdf market from a business standpoint. No clear unified voice. I saw different companies kind of going in different directions. I saw duplication of effort. I saw a fragmented purchaser base. I also saw an accounting headache in dealing with putting the various books on various sites and tracking payments to us and thus to authors etc. I also clearly saw that pdf-only or pdf-primary was not a solid product plan for Necro for various reasons. I think that has now changed.Lets take a little design detour for a minute so you can understand what i mean. The PDF only publishers have done a great job, but the market has been conceededly limited. You just dont move the same numbers of a pdf as a print product. Now look at the print publishers. Sure, many of them distribute their books as pdfs. But those products were all (well, i cant say all since i havent seen them all, but certainly the vast majority) designed as print products first with pdfs as an added bonus. Most pdf products are just a print product delivered in a different form--pdf. With OBS, I think there is now a viable delivery mechanism that can exploit the benefits of the pdf medium. Now OBS has focused the business model, it has unified (not totally <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) the customer base. It has solved the accounting headaches for publishers like me, it has increased the potential customer base, it is no longer duplicating effort and going in different directions which seemed to be aimed at addressing certain niches rather than developing as a mainstream means of delivering product. It allows for more focused advertising to grow the customer base. I might be a total geek, but I am absolutely out of my mind excited about this. because I have always seen and loved the potential of PDF products. I just hadnt really seen the market that had the growth potential I wanted to be a part of. Now I do.What I mean by all this is that I, as a print publisher, am now working on a product that will be PDF first. And by that I dont mean Monte's "release the pdf of the print product a bit ahead of time" strategy (which was genius, by the way).  I mean the pdf will be its own product, designed specifically as a pdf. I will eventually produce a print product, but the two will be designed differently. Because you use a pdf differently. Perhaps this is bold, but I intend to product a product that is SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED not just to be a print product but to be used as a pdf. You dont get that in a print product. And you dont get that in a pdf of a product that is designed for print. In other words, I see the formation of OBS as allowing print publishers to consider pdf primary products. That is a HUGE step into what I consider to be the future of our game and the way materials will be delivered to us for D&D.Clark</blockquote>

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