Kesh said:
In a sense, yes. See, Safari by default is set to open files for you when they download. So, you download the file, it sees it's a ZIP, decompresses it, and now you've got the file ready to view.
Actually, I checked it out: When you choose open, it will open the archive in winrar, and you can then click on the file within winrar to open it in adobe.
Still, that now involves three different programmes instead of one (if they just go their normal way and put it up as HTML) or two (if they ignore zip. And I mean: who doesn't ignore zip?)
Prophet2b said:
PDF's are considered more "professional"
As others have said: They seem to be fire with HTML for practically everything else, it's just so weird why they deviate from their usual methods for the TOC.
Jim Hague said:
Alternately, they could simply offer...nothing.
So? As long as things could be worse, no one should bother improving them?
The previews show that they actually care about giving the customer a sneak peek.
Which they, of course, don't do because they're philanthropists, but because it will make some people buy their products. And the fewer the hoops they have to jump through to get your incentive to buy their products, the more likely it is for the customers to buy them.
but not buying because of that is, frankly, petty.
You imply that people won't buy out of spite. That might indeed be the case in some cases (after their murdering Dragon and Dungeon, I guess it's more than just a few cases, but that's nothing to do with the current topic), but you don't see the big picture: As I said, those excerpts are there to make people buy books. You're supposed to look at the teasers, get giddy like a schoolgirl, and go get your copy of the book. But if you do something like, say, offer the preview as a .pdf document hidden in a .zip archive, instead of presenting it in good old HTML right on the web page, there will be people who won't bother with Wizards' take on the Russian Doll, so they never get excited about the book, and their money goes elsewhere.
Let's assume that it will take some Wizards employee 5 more minutes to put it up as HTML instead of the current scheme, and let's assume that only one guy will now look at the TOC, get excited, and buy the book (while he would not have done this had it been in a zipped pdf). And let's assume that Wizards gets 5 tacken per book. That guy just earned 5 tacken in 5 minutes. That's 60 per hour. Not that bad.
I'd think that it would push over half a dozen people, and that Wizards gets more than 5 big ones per book, and that it probably doesn't even take 5 extra minutes.
